Creating New Investment Business Models

The Centre of Excellence in Energy Efficiency (C3E) invested $348,150 in AddÉnergie through its pre-seed fund. That funding—part of a $2 million round of financing—enabled the company to begin marketing its “smart” charging stations for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. It also leveraged C3E’s investment to raise more than $5 million in round A financing, which it will use to scale up Canadian sales and to bring its DC fast-charging stations to market in 2012. Look for its stations soon in Québec City and Montreal. The first 60 units will be installed by November; 10 of which are part of a new contract with Communauto, the largest electric vehicle car-sharing project in North America.
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Greening Canada’s Aircrafts to Compete Globally

A national consortium of 25 public and private sector partners, including original equipment manufacturers and small- and medium-sized companies, founded the Green Aviation Research and Development Network, which is helping industry take promising research to the development, testing and prototype stages. The creation of the GARDN was considered critical to executing the technologies roadmap.
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Exporting Canadian Knowledge to Emerging Economies

A chance conversation at a Canadian Digital Media Network-organized Canada 3.0 conference in May 2010 put Dana Fox and David Murdoch, senior vice-president together with a software programmer who was working on similar technology. By October, they had a working prototype, a new company, a provisional patent and a single desk at The Communitech Hub in Kitchener—one of nine centres across Canada that make up the CDMN. After completing incubation at the hub in April 2011, ClevrU had 10 employees, MOU’s in Canada and an agreement with China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier, to pilot English as a second language lessons and open-class content from Ivey League North America universities with more than one million students in fall 2011. The company is now in talks with all three Chinese telecommunications carriers with over 700 million subscribers as well as one of the largest data center manufacturers in the world.
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Improving Patient Care and Hospital Revenues

MaRS Innovation’s $300,000 investment in VitalHub is enabling the company to move from a pilot trial to a full-scale roll out of products used at Mount Sinai Hospital, that will increase the amount of data that can aggregated and more easily integrated into other hospital informatics systems. The Mount Sinai spin-off has now raised $1 million in financing and plans to hire another 10 people over the coming months. The company has preliminary agreements to roll out its solution at three other Canadian hospitals and are in talks with several U.S. providers.
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Leveraging Canada's Investment in Big Science Facilities

Advanced Applied Physics Solutions (AAPS), the commercialization partner of TRIUMF, brought together a multi-sector collaboration of university partners, the Geological Survey of Canada, BC Industry of Mines and a Canadian mining company to conduct proof-of-principle tests on the system. Initial tests on Vancouver Island, in partnership with Nyrstar Myra Falls (formerly NVI-Breakwater), demonstrated that muon tomography can successfully identify ore bodies underground. AAPS plans to launch a spin-off company to commercialize the technology.
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Linking Small Firms with Partners and Investors

Wavefront facilitated introductions to potential investors and partners. The Wavefront Ac­celerator Centre provided a collaborative and supportive environment to validate marketing concepts and product functionality utilizing Wavefront’s handset library and peer network. The result? RewardLoop secured seed funding that allowed them to hire three employees with plans to hire another six to ten by the end of the year. RewardLoop was also able to secure pilot orders with major, national restaurant and retail chains and secure international distribution deals for its RewardLoop Connect devices that begin shipping in the last quarter of 2010-11.
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Planning Now for a Sustainable and Prosperous Arctic

ArcticNet is an important contributor to the government’s $22-million Beaufort Regional Environmental Assessment (BREA)—a multi-stakeholder initiative that will allow for more informed environmental assessments and regulatory processes. In 2010, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada enlisted ArcticNet to review and document the large amount of data collected in the Beaufort Sea environment primarily through ArcticNet and other major academic-lead international research programs over the last decade. Released in March 2011, the data mining report will benefit regulators, government departments, Inuvialuit institutions and industry. ArcticNet researchers aboard the Canadian research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen will also lead four BREA research projects beginning in 2011.
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Public-Private Partnership Delivers Green Solutions

GreenCentre Canada extensively developed and tested the technology over the past two years, reducing the risk for future investors. GreenCentre then teamed with Stewardship Ontario and two of its industry sponsors (Fielding Chemical Technologies, Mississauga and NexCycle Plastics Canada, Brampton) to create Switchable Solutions to commercialize the technology. The company is initially targeting three market sectors: plastics recycling, oil sands processing and seed oil extraction. Its first plastics recycling plant, currently under construction in Mississauga, will divert about two million kilograms per year of foam cushion packaging, soiled food containers and other used plastic from Ontario landfills. Four other plants are planned for Ontario and the United States.
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Re-Building Global Markets for Canadian Beef

Thanks to the NCE’s International Partnership Initiative, PrioNet has established dozens of partnerships with research organizations from around the world and held valuable knowledge exchanges with several countries, including China, the United States, Mexico, Spain, Scotland and Austria. In November 2010, PrioNet partnered with scientific networks and government agencies in Japan, and the Alberta Prion Research Institute and Alberta Meat and Livestock Association to present the first Canada-Japan scientific exchange on prion diseases. The two-day workshop in Tokyo drew over one hundred attendees, including dozens of Japanese policy-makers and government officials. At the workshop, the Japanese shared a wealth of data generated from the “Farm to Fork” tracking system that their country established following their first case of BSE in 2001. Canada does not currently employ such a system, but PrioNet researcher Dr. Ellen Goddard’s work from the University of Alberta has illustrated how such tracking systems here in Canada could lead to greater demand for Canadian beef products in Japan and other markets.
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Sharing Entrepreneurial Expertise with Small Firms

The Ontario Centre of Excellence’s (OCE) Centre for Commercialization of Research (CCR) connected REGEN with a new CEO, Tim Angus, through its Embedded Executive program. Angus has a proven track record of leveraging private and public equity markets for growth stage companies. CCR also participated in the equity financing round, investing additional funds in REGEN and, through its participation, helped to attract other investors. The company recently received $5.5 million in venture capital from industry players, and expects to create 15-30 new jobs in Ontario over the next three years.
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Science Gives Small Companies a Competitive Edge

Mitacs-Accelerate intern Megan MacGillivray, a Ph.D. student from the University of British Columbia, and her supervisor Dr. Bonita Sawatzky, are evaluating the biomechanical differences between SideStix crutches and traditional forearm crutches. SideStix is already using preliminary research results to make product design improvements to aid walking and reduce overuse injuries. As a small company, SideStix was able to afford the internship through cost-sharing with Mitacs-Accelerate and the Industrial Research Assistance Program.
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Stimulating Economic Development in Small-Town Ontario

Carleton University architecture professor Stephen Fai and graduate students Katie Graham, Todd Duckworth and Nevil Wood—funded through the Mitacs-Accelerate internship program—developed a 3D computer model that produces life-like simulations showing how this historic town looked in the past, what it looks like today, and what it could look like in the future. BDC will use this building information model as a planning and marketing tool to plan roads, infrastructure and construction, and to show potential clients what’s available in the village and how their project fits into the community. The design could become a model for other small towns. Nevil recently presented the model, which he has described as “Google Earth on steroids,” in Prague to the bi-annual meeting of the International Committee for Documentation of Cultural Heritage (a committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites).
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Supporting Economic Development in First Nation Communities

Mitacs-Accelerate negotiated an innovative cost-shared pilot partnership with First Nations in the Great Bear Rainforest, through Coast Opportunity Funds and ISIS at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business. The partnership, which began in 2009, supported several projects in 2010-11 involving nine graduate student interns from ISIS, working with three First Nations communities. Projects included: a business case analysis for a community hydro facility with the Gitga’at First Nation; feasibility studies for Haida Enterprise Corporation (HaiCo); and feasibility studies for Heiltsuk Economic Development Corporation (HEDC). The latter studies, by interns Neil McGuigan, Adam McKechnie, Joanna Pedersen and Rachael Kitagawa, enabled HEDC to double its annual revenues, save $100,000 annually by relocating its freight company operations, create six new jobs at HEDC and raise over $1 million to refurbish the Bella Bella Fish Plant, which will create more than 100 new jobs.
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University Expertise Supports Canadian Manufacturers

APOC was awarded more than $15,000 through an NSERC-Mitacs Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship to support a chemical engineering master’s student from Queen’s University. Stephen Snyder developed mathematical models for predicting the stability of two test cartridges used for point-of-care blood analysis. The research results were published in a prestigious scientific journal and presented at three conferences in the United States and in Canada. Stephen joined APOC full time as an intermediate engineer in November 2010, and is now working on follow-up projects to improve some of the stability characteristics described by his earlier modeling work.
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