higher education : Innovation + Job News

Toronto is known for its cutting edge academic and medical research facilities, but the path from the lab to the marketplace isn't always short or direct.

In 2008, with the goal of making the most of the findings coming out of those facilities, 16 leading institutions including Ryerson University, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and OCAD University joined forces to create MaRS Innovation, a collective commercialization agent. (The MaRS Discovery District, the innovation centre for entrepreneurs, is also a member, though they are often confused, MaRS DD and MaRS Innovation are two separate organizations.)

MaRS Innovation was started with the help of a five year, $15 million federal investment, and this month they were glad to announce they've been awarded a new $15 million grant. The new round of funding comes from the federally run Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program.

MaRS Innovation was created, says president and CEO Raphael Hofstein, "to address a very interesting challenge for Canada, which is 'how do you turn outstanding research into something that directly helps the economy?'"

The initial five year period of support, he goes on, was to establish a foundation for the organization. "Now in the next three or four years, we will build the tower on top of the foundation." The first five years gave them a good start, he explains, but it's "a bit of a challenge" as far as the timeline for development with still-emerging technologies. By the end of this second five year period, MaRS will have "meaningful operations"--businesses that have emerged from the research innovations coming out of the member institutions. This funding program, he concludes, "is a game-changer."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Raphael Hofstein, President and CEO, MaRS Innovation

The Association of University Technology Managers, among other things, monitors academic technology transfer data. That is, it looks at the rate at which technological innovations that start out in universities and colleges make it out into the wider world. It's an important indicator, as it helps us understand how effectively and often research gets applied—the rate at which innovations have a chance at actually improving our lives and contributing to our economy.

Recently AUTM released their 2011 Canadian Licensing Activity Survey, and their findings are encouraging. Writing on behalf of the organization, assistant vice-president Gina Funicelli said the survey shows "increased activity between institutions and industry." Moreover, says Funicelli, "a greater focus on industry engagement by Canadian institutions is returning dividends in the form of increased income and institutional equity."

One particularly strong result, according to the survey: "The number of startups created by Canadian institutions increased by 36 per cent" in 2011. (This is perhaps especially significant given that research expenditures were actually down.) And those startups are staying close to home: 100 per cent of them are in the home province of their licensing institution.

For those interested in Toronto's position in all this, here's a number that's certainly startling: of the 68 startups described above, a whopping 34 per cent, or 23 startups, formed from a single institution—the University of Toronto.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: The Association of University Technology Managers Canadian Licensing Activity Survey (2011)

"I've always been an entrepreneur my entire life," says Donny Ouyang, "I started when I was 12."

Like many young entrepreneurs, he quickly found himself more intrigued by his extracurricular activities than anything in the classroom. "Because of that I didn't spend a lot of time learning," Ouyang says. And then, after a pause: "School... wasn't my thing."

It's perhaps especially fitting then that Ouyang has just launched what he describes as the world's first market-driven tutoring platform, called Rayku. He's hoping not only to find success with his startup, but to help students like him who have had bad experiences both at school and with traditional tutoring.

Rayku's idea is simple: tutors sign up to provide online assistance to students via the site's whiteboard and other digitial services, and are rated by their students as they go. The higher they rank—in theory, the more effective they are—the more they can charge.

Currently Rayku is focused on high school and first year univerisity students who need help with math. Ouyang plans to expand in a number of directions: first to other areas of the curriculum (science, essay writing), then to other levels of complexity, and then to a broader range of subjects—everything from standardized test preparation services to financial advising.

The startup has raised $400,000 of investment so far, and is "hiring aggressively," says Ouyang. He hopes to add two business development positions and two engineers to Rayku's staff by January.
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Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Donny Ouyang, Founder & CEO, Rayku

As more and more of us live in cities, the challenges of maintaining urban environments multiply. The Centre for Urban Energy at Ryerson University is dedicated to studying some of these issues, ranging from renewable energy sources that are scaled for cities to building techniques which reduce our need for energy in the first place. To help develop the community of people working to address these challenges, the CUE has just launched a new accelerator program: i-CUE.

The Innovation Centre for Urban Energy is a business incubator—essentially an innovation lab within the centre—that will provide support for up to 10 projects at a time. Ryerson students and faculty, and members of the community at large, are all able to apply. The goal is to provide those with a "mature business idea" some tools to help get it off the ground, says executive director Dan McGillvray, which can mean anything from guidance for writing government grant applications to help overcoming technical challenges.

If a proposed project fits within the centre's scope and makes a convincing case, i-CUE will offer three months of free lab support to develop a business plan. If things are moving well, you might get another three months, McGillvray says (albeit with a bit of "pain" in the form of paying to offset some of the lab's costs). On the other hand, "you might be asked to go." It is, he says, "a fail fast model... It's not a lab where you will live forever; it's a lab where you will graduate out... into another location—[because] now you're business."

Four companies are currently being incubated at i-CUE. Among them is one project led by Ryerson students aimed at educating the public about energy conversation, and another developing public charging stations for mobile devices.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Souce: Dan McGillivray, Executive Director, Innovation Centre for Urban Energy

A problem that we all know about: most mainstream media outlets are currently worried about their futures, facing a dangerous mix of declining revenue, audience fragmentation and eroding public trust.

A problem we discuss less often: the education we offer aspiring journalists hasn't fully caught up to these developments.

Most journalism schools still offer the sort of training they did 10 or 20 years ago: the basics of composition, interviewing, fact-checking and so forth. They've added some instruction to accomodate changes in technology—students can now learn about best practices in social media, for instance—but they haven't adapted to one of the most basic shifts in the industry: newsrooms are relying more on freelancers, ess on staff reporters, to fill their pages and broadcasts. Thus, while graduates of these traditional programs may be able to produce good stories, they haven't been trained to market or sell them to editors—which many, lacking a permanent full-time job, quickly discover is a necessity.

A new fellowship program at U of T is hoping to reverse the traditional order of operations (learn to be a journalist, then acquire a beat and develop subject-specific knowledge): begin with professionals who already have subject-matter expertise, and teach them how to use that knowledge to launch careers or side-businesses in journalism. Because participants already have some professional experience and standing, says program director Robert Steiner, the goal is to "make it about the work, not the degree." This means that participants are focusing on learning how to generate story ideas, pitch them to outlets, and make the most of their expertise by actually doing all of those things (with the help of expert guidance)—not at a university newspaper or through internships, but by pitching major media outlets just a few weeks after starting the program. Early signs are promising: so far one participant has written what became the lead story in the Star's GTA section last week; several others have been published in national newspapers as well.

Steiner freely admits this program won't save journalism as an industry—nor is that his goal ("one of my most liberating moments in this whole experience is when I realized that I wasn't out to save newspapers") but he does hope it will attract some interesting new talent to the field at a time when traditional training methods may not quite be doing the trick.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Robert Steiner, Director of the Fellowship in Glorbal Journalism at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

"Just a year ago, Ontario’s Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress... published a report that quantifiably demonstrated that in per capital GDP, measured in comparison to 16 other large states and provinces in North America, Ontario ranked 15th. A lack of innovation combined with lower productivity is a significant problem for everyone—especially in Ontario. No amount of handwringing will solve it. No amount of cheerleading should make us believe we are doing better than what we really are. And no amount of naysaying should stop us from tackling this problem head on."

Stark language from Anne Sado, president of George Brown College, who addressed the Empire Club earlier this week. She was there to present findings from a new George Brown study called Toronto Next: Return on Innovation, which surveyed more thn 300 Toronto-area employers to learn more about the state of innovation locally. Sado wasn't just interested in describing problems, however—she was much more interested in proposing some solutions.

There are reasons to be hopeful that the situation can change. For starters, the issue isn't a lack of funds. Companies have the money; they are just risk-averse. "GTA businesses are more interested in productivity than innovation or creativity," said Sado, suggesting that what we need to effect is a cultural shift in our understanding of what innovation is, exactly, and why it's so important.

At George Brown, she explained, they defined innovation as "the process of creating social or economic value from something that already exists"—a contrast with the businesses they surveyed, which defined innovation in terms of novelty (creating new processes or products or thinking in new ways). Because of this definition, Sado believes, those businesses don't see any strong or direct links between innovation and productivity—most new inventions both cost a lot and fail, after all—and thus they don't value innovation enough.

In her speech Sado emphasized that one major key to advancing innovation is collaboration, and especially collaboration between post-secondary institutions and the private sector. This both facilitates the development of those iterative improvements, and mitigates some of the concerns about risk, since various parties can each contribute in their areas of expertise, and work together to improve products before they are brought to market.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Anne Sado, President, George Brown College

With the help of $6.6 million from the federal government, in addition to $6.8 million of its own money, George Brown College recently announced that it will be creating a dedicated Green Buildings Centre on its Casa Loma campus. They are renovating existing facilities and building new ones to house the centre, which has a target completion date of March 2014. The project is expected to create 35 new jobs.

Robert Luke, assistant vice president of research and innovation for George Brown, says that creating this new centre will be a bit like "changing the wheel on a moving car." Since George Brown already does some work in this area, they will maintain their current activities while managing the expansion simultaneously.

Luke came to the college about five years go to establish a research office, he says, after "the federal government recognized that we needed to pull the lever for industry in the education space.... That imbalance is very dangerous to our long-term competetivness." That's why George Brown has been working to integrate industry partners in their activities, providing many hands-on formal and informal opportunities for students to learn from them while also pursuing their studies.

Industry partners, meanwhile, have the opportunity to pursue applied research. That practice will continue at this new centre, which will focus on environmentally friendly "advanced construction systems, green energy and computer-enabled, efficient buildings."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Robert Luke, Assistant Vice President of Research and Innovation, George Brown College

For years, teachers and professors have struggled with suppressing the use of cellphones in classrooms. As the phones got smarter, students got more absorbed, and the fight against distracton grew only more challenging as laptops and tablets became ubiquitous, too.

Going with the flow instead of against it is software company Top Hat Monocle, which was started—fittingly—by two students as a graduate project. Described as a "classroom response system," Top Hat provides instructors with a suite of tools they can use both during class and after to make learning more interactive, and provide students with real-time feedback. A professor can use it, for instance, to administer a quiz at the end of a lecture, and both she and her students could see the results instantaneously, while still in class together.

Top Hat formally launched in 2010, and secured its first found of financing—$1.5 million—in November 2011. Last week it announced a major new round of funding: $8 million, drawn from several venture capital investors. The significant influx will help the company accomplish two key goals, says chief revenue officer Andrew D'Souza.

"One, we're really hoping to expand the functionality and increase the interactivity." (One such expansion: in the fall the company will be adding the capacity to "turn your in-class experience into a competetive type game," where students challenge each other to test their familiarity with course material.) Second, says D'Souza, the financing will "really drive the sales and marketing." More precisely, the aim is to grow from a current base of 200,000 users to one million users in the next two years.

Top Hat currently has 35 staff, and is now hiring at the rate of 2 to 3 positions a week; the target is to hit 80 staff in total by year's end. The majority of those positions will be at the company's home base here in Toronto, where they do product development and are hiring "aggressively," particularly on the engineering side. The company also has a distributed sales team, and a small office in San Francisco; staffing in those operations will be growing as well.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Andrew D'Souza, Chief Revenue Officer, Top Hat Monocle

Way back in 1995, the company that would become Destiny Solutions was founded as Destiny Web Designs, putting the best practices of the then emerging World Wide Web to work for Toronto business clients.

"One of our clients was the University of Toronto's continuing education department. We built out their site in the late 1990s and realized there was a huge opportunity in creating applications for this new market in higher education," says senior vice president Jonathan Tice. The needs of continuing education departments are different than those of traditional "tuition cohort" models, and new administrative tools were needed to help grow the potential of those departments. 

He says that U of T was the first university in North America to put its systems fully online in 2001, and the reputation the school's then-president, Mary Cone Berry, had as an innovator gave the newly born Destiny Solutions a great advantage. "That relationship made it easy to make Stanford our second client."

Eleven years later, the Yonge and Eglinton-based company is the leader in providing specific administrative solutions for non-traditional learning departments at some of North America's biggest and most prestigious schools, including Georgetown, Duke, Penn State, Stanford and University of Toronto. It's a market that has begun to rapidly transform education itself. Tice cites US education department executive Richard Culatta's impression that "this is education's Internet moment."

"We're growing quite quickly," says Tice. Currently at 40 employees, the company is hiring for nine positions now. Tice says they've been growing their staff at a rate of about 25 per cent per year—revenue growth has significantly outpaced that. "We really can't hire fast enough, but we're very specific about who we hire. We serve clients who are the best in the world, and we're really looking for A-players."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jonathan Tice, Senior Vice President, Destiny Solutions

One of the primary problems facing the world of sustainable energy is storage: since solar and wind power are "intermittent"—that is, they generate electricity at the whims of the sunshine and wind, rather than constantly or on demand—energy needs to be stored until there is demand for it. Batteries capable of doing so have so far been too large and expensive to be a solution.

Ryerson electrical engineering researcher Kamran Masteri Farahani has been conducting research for Toronto-based startup Temporal Power for the past 18 months. And he says the results show a breakthrough.

"This solves the problem of storage for wind power," he says. "This will change energy storage completely."

Temporal Power has developed a storage technique that involves flywheels spinning to store the energy kinetically. The company, in collaboration with Hydro One and Toronto Hydro, has created flywheels that are cheaper and easier to maintain than batteries. Masteri says his research, conducted at Ryerson's Centre for Urban Energy, shows that it works.

"After 10 hours, the flywheels still maintain 95 per cent efficiency," he says. "They also hold up to twice as much energy as competitor techniques, and 50 times as much energy as most commercially available materials." He says that the technology also regulates voltage and can feed or draw from the grid as needed, making much of the existing (and expensive) regulation technology redundant.

If Hydro One's own tests confirm the Ryerson result, the company will begin implementing the technology in its own system by the end of the summer.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Kamran Masteri Farahani, Electrical Engineering Researcher, Centre for Urban Energy, Ryerson University

Three-year-old classroom education innovators Top Hat Monocle are hiring now in Toronto as they move their headquarters from Waterloo to the big city.

"We're currently in a co-working space in Toronto as we await our official office space later this quarter," says CEO Mike Silagadze by email.

The company was founded by University of Waterloo students Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini when, for a class project, they decided to try to put the mobile devices students carry with them to use as learning aids. The reaction to the project was so good that they launched the concept as a business with $300,000 from Waterloo-area angel investors (they have since raised a total of $1.5 million in investment).

Three years later, their products are used on more than 85 university campuses around the world—including Harvard—and the company has seen more than $5 million in sales, according to a recent report.

Today, they continue to grow. Top Hat Monocle has opened a San Francisco office. The HQ relocation to TO, Silagadze says, is motivated primarily by recruiting purposes, "It was very hard to convince top candidates to move to Waterloo, and we in fact lost a few people that way. So long term, the right decision was for the company to be in Toronto."

The company currently has 24 full-time employees. Perks include weeks available to work on personal projects, catered staff meals and video game tournaments. The company is hiring developers, designers and sales reps right now—lots of them. "We'll likely need to hire another 20 to 30 sales reps and another 10 developers in the next six months," Silagadze says. "It's going to be a busy time."

Sources: Mike Silagasze, CEO, Top Hat Monocle; Yahoo! Small Business advisor

Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo of the University of Toronto, working with fellow U of T researcher Bing Qi and Spanish professor Marcos Curty, has published research on a new encryption method that could present a quantum leap forward in the attempt to thwart hackers. And that's a literal quantum leap.

The method, Measurement Device Independent QKD, is detailed in the physics Journal Physics Review Letters. It is an advancement in the field of quantum encryption, the technique for securing data transmitted over the Internet from hackers.

"Standard quantum encryption method is currently being used by various Swiss banks in encrypting critical data traffic. I have personally been an expert in the task force on the standardization of quantum key distribution products in Europe," says Lo.

The complicated field employed to secure information from prying eyes has long suffered from an "Achilles' heel" in the form of photon detectors, a problem Lo's group proposes it has solved. "We believe that our new method will significantly contribute to the standardization process and can be a game-changer in future quantum cryptographic products," Lo says.

The research team, who have already tested their method as a "proof of concept," expect to have a prototype available within five years. Lo says that the product could be commercialized within five years—and possibly much sooner—of the building of a prototype. "We are very interested in bringing our new method to the market. Currently, we are looking for industrial partners that will help us to co-develop our prototype."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Hoi-Kwong Lo, Professor, University of Toronto

A program that Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Innovation Brad Duguid says will "foster tomorrow's business leaders" offers enterprising students looking for a summer job the chance to create their own.

The Summer Company initiative offers students aged between 15 and 29 funding of $3,000, alongside training and business coaching, to start their own business.

Those accepted into the program get $1,500 up front in seed money, as well as $1,500 upon completion of the program. They're also partnered with a business mentor to help them implement their business plan. Program guidelines say that almost any type of business can qualify, as long as it is owned and operated independently by the applicant and is a new startup. It is a competitive program with limited spaces—students wishing to apply can visit the Summer Company website for information on how to register.

The program is one of a few initiatives by the province to aid students looking for summer employment. Others include job listings and a $2-per-hour subsidy for employers.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Andrew Block, Office of the Minister of Economic Development and Innovation

Dr. Marvin Schwartz is a maxillofacial surgeon who has seen his share of arthritic joint problems.

"You could say this is many years in the making," he says of his company, 4iBIO, which is conducting clinical trials now on an artificial joint implant it hopes to make available for animal use this year.

"Helping humans is down the road," he says, noting that regulatory approvals are much more difficult for the human medical market than for the veterinary one. "The process is set. I have an American patent and other patents to follow. We've finished clinical trials on sheep hips, we're just finishing a clinical trial on dogs, and we have the intention of going to the veterinary market in about six months," he says.

The current dog trials are being conducted at the University of Guelph, with 50 per cent of the funding coming from the federal government (and the other half coming from 4iBIO). Schwartz says that he is seeking about $1.5 million now to set up a manufacturing facility in the GTA that will receive imaging data—such as CT scans—from doctors anywhere in the world and create a custom-made prosthesis for the patient using 3D modelling. For the trials, the company's three principals have been contracting out the manufacturing work, but expect to hire about three staff for the new plant when it opens.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Dr. Marvin Schwartz, CEO, 4iBIO 

The Ryerson University DMZ—short for Digital Media Zone—launched in the spring of 2010 to incubate new, innovative businesses from Ryerson students and alumni. Less than two years and 39 startups later, the incubator is growing.

This spring, it will open a new 5,400 square-foot space in the basement of the building it occupies at 10 Dundas Street East, bringing its total space to about 15,800 square feet.

"With the addition of the new space, the Zone will be able to accommodate about 50 new innovators," says DMZ media representative Lauren Schneider.

Schneider says that the Zone's successes so far—including noteworthy startups 500px, Shape Collage and Teamsave—have seen seven companies "graduate" to their own office spaces and have created 357 new jobs, plus 48 direct jobs supporting the Zone at Ryerson.

The growth, Schneider says, builds on the DMZ's mandate. "The Digital Media Zone will continue to play a key role in Toronto’s new digital economy by fostering young innovators... to help keep the world’s best talent here and contributing to our economy."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Lauren Schneider, Media Relations, Ryerson DMZ