MaRS wins city award
The who’s who of city building has spoken and MaRS has made the cut.
The Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) announced this week that MaRS has earned its Creative City Award for our role in building creative capacity in Toronto.
Dr. John Evans and Gord Nixon on BNN
Innovation must be the topic of the month. In the ruthless arena of live television, it’s not a bad sign when your seven-minute slot doubles while you’re on-air.
Incoming MaRS Chair Gordon Nixon joined Dr. John Evans, Founding Chair of MaRS, for a discussion dubbed “Innovate or Stagnate” this week on one of the liveliest business shows in Canadian television. And they so charmed Squeezeplay hosts Amanda Lang and Paul Waldie that seven minutes turned into a solid 15. At least that’s what it looked like from the Business News Network green room, although it might also have had something to do with Mr. Nixon’s full-time job as CEO of RBC…
Aphrodisiac Telephone
I recently visited Surreal Things, a special exhibition on Surrealism by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The exhibition explores the philosophy behind Surrealism and how those ideas inspired more commercially minded designers of fashion, jewelry and other consumer goods. As I was wandering there amongst ruby lips, aphrodisiac telephones and cloud sofas, it struck me that there is something in common between the surrealist ideals and the culture of entrepreneurship that MaRS is helping to build in Ontario.
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.
Crumbling monoliths bring opportunity
Monolitten - “The Monolith” - is a 17m high Norwegian monument. As with all monoliths, The Monolith is carved out of a single piece of rock - in this case, granite.
During the 1990s, the monolithic software application dominated the enterprise software market, both architecturally and in business models. Originally associated with mainframe computing, in software terms, “monolithic” describes a self-contained software package in which user interface and data processing code is wrapped into a single, proprietary solution with little or no interaction with other software. Software empires like Microsoft, CA and Oracle were all built on the back of monolithic solutions.
The enterprise applications market is changing away from the monolithic model — driven primarily by the ubiquity of internet-related technologies, making the monolith increasingly porous and dependent on services, lightweight applications and deep links with data and functions delivered by third parties. This isn’t news to anyone who pays attention to the field - it merely confirms a trend. However, as monolithic software packages become a thing of the past, we’re finding opportunities for start-ups in this space. This is discussed in MaRS’ latest Market Snapshot: Enterprise Applications: Opportunities for Ontario’s software start-ups
Last week’s CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 class was treated to a bravura presentation by Mike Polonsky of the Equicom Group on how to give a presentation. Mike’s talk featured a number of key messages on how to effectively tell a story about your ideas, your company, your investment opportunity.
This raises for me an interesting question. Our education system increasingly relies on having teams of students “present” the results of some project (this seems to reach back as early as junior high school, but clearly continues up to the classic seminars of graduate school). But does anyone ever teach us in school how to give an effective presentation?
New Product FAIL!
I don’t think I have ever in my life felt so encouraged to fail as I have lately. It’s a little counter-intuitive for me, I have to admit. I keep hearing it in the office regularly as we try to develop new programming here at MaRS (pilot, fail, tweak, repeat) and I keep seeing it in my daily reading — from the Globe and Mail to Fail Blog. Then there’s the double whammy when the people in our office show up in my daily reading.
A few weeks ago, Charles Plant discussed failure and risk as it relates to innovation in this Report on Business article, and this week in the Globe, our own entrepreneur-in-residence Ron Close took on the topic of “How to embrace risk and innovation.” Ron not only shares his thoughts on entrepreneurship, but the more ambiguous act of intrapreneurship, or innovating within a larger organization.
At last week’s CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 lecture, attendees heard Lance Laking, an experienced entrepreneur and MaRS advisor, speak about the key factors in building teams in companies - coupling the disparate values of peer-recognition motivated, technically focused staff with the “coin operated” attitude of a sales team.
Although this is somewhat of a chicken and egg question, which do you think is the most important: the technical folks who design and develop the product, or the sales people who convince customers to buy it? How should you, the company CEO, divide up the rewards?
Roll up, roll up! The 2009 edition of the MaRS Regenerative Medicine Industry Briefing is now available.
New content in the 2009 edition includes:
At last week’s CIBC present Entrepreneurship 101 lecture, Tammy Sturge, of HR Transformations and four-time Entrepreneurship 101 presenter, laid it all on the line for the budding entrepreneur reviewing the ins and outs of hiring and firing. The importance of finding the right employee at the right time for the right position is crucial to building your business. Bad hires and just filling gaps can lead to the focus being in the wrong place as a business grows.
Tammy’s step-by-step tips on interviewing, offers, performance management and, yes, terminations are helpful to anyone building a business and great refreshers for those at larger organizations.
Dawn Marie develops and implements fundraising programs for MaRS, including annual giving and major gifts, as well as our donor relations program.
