The social tech for social change week
Toronto is abuzz with innovators, social entrepreneurs, digital media developers and leading design thinkers, not to mention a swath of charitable organizations dedicated to social change.
Imagine if these communities were working together. It could be transformational.
Over the past 8 months, the Martin Prosperity Institute has been collecting a massive data set to analyze how well regions in North America perform on our 3Ts of economic development. We did this so that we could benchmark how well Ontario and its regions compete.
So how did Ontario measure up?
Today marks the release of a new working paper that discusses the opportunities for entrepreneurial activity in the province of Ontario. Researcher Scott Pennington at the Martin Prosperity Institute wanted to bring new dimensions to how this activity is examined both geographically as well as through the lens of occupational profiles. In support of the project Ontario in the Creative Age, Pennington creates a novel Entrepreneurship Index that shows several interesting insights for Ontario (read the paper).
Here are some highlights: Read the rest of this entry »
Faster than a speeding inventor
Consultation with users is key
Last month I told you that I needed to really understand the science before I had any hope of solving a medical problem.
This month I’m telling you that the science allowed us to come up with ideas for the technology that could potentially solve the given medical problem but that we really needed to understand the physicians and the patients (our users) in order to design the product.
Last week’s budget is getting mixed reviews in the research community. “Money for bricks, but not talent” read one prominent headline.
At first glance, its overall strategy is somewhat puzzling:
Even Einstein had to do the research
Four months into our immersion in the Biodesign fellowship here at Stanford University (with a team of two physicians and two engineers designing medical devices), I can finally say what I think is working for us: understanding the science.
After spending a month in the hospital looking for problems and a month in the office looking at the patients affected by the problem and data about the problem, we brainstormed ideas on how to fix it. The result: if we didn’t go into the room with great information on the problem, we didn’t come out of the room with great ideas on how to solve it.
Mark your calendars for PharmaSutra — featuring animations by MaRS tenant, AXS Studio — which airs this Saturday, December 6th at 7PM on CTV.
This one hour HD special documents the race to discover and market “Female Viagra” — a huge new market segment for the pharmaceutical industry.
Design ecosystem: A web of connections
This is our second guest post in a series focusing on the role of design thinking in successful innovation. In our first post we defined design thinking and explained the critical distinction between invention and innovation. Today we’re talking about what we at Strategic Innovation Lab (formerly the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity) call the design ecosystem – a term that expresses the numerous dynamic, interdependent factors and relationships that must be taken into account in bringing a new or improved product or service to market.
We are all connected at MaRS
MaRS has been named a winner of the 2008 Nemertes PilotHouse Innovator Award, “a distinguished honor recognizing companies that effectively leverage both VOIP and Unified Communications (UC) to improve their operations.”
Originally nominated as a thought leader in multimedia and UC, MaRS demonstrated exceptional use of information technology placing us in the top 20 of 117 organizations including such leaders as Siemens and Cisco.
Nick Glanville is interning with MaRS while he finishes studies at the University of Toronto.
