Insulin tops the list, but who made the money?

In the course of looking for background on Canadian Inventions, I came upon a list of the top 50 Canadian Inventions (Five-Pin Bowling is number four). This list came out of a show put on by the CBC (who else) in 2007. Following on the heels of the Greatest Canadian this show put it to all Canadians to rank our 50 greatest inventions.

I was trolling through this list and suddenly it struck me. I couldn’t identify a single company that had been created and gained worldwide prominence out of the first 15 inventions. Where was the pharmaceutical giant spawned from the development of insulin, the nutraceutical behemoth formed from Pablum? Instead I found a list of fabulous inventions which, for the most part, were opportunities not seized. Certainly Poutine has been a worldwide phenom but have we capitalized on its creation to bring untold wealth back home?

In the top 15 companies there were only two examples of a Canadian company that continues today to benefit from the commercialization of a Canadian invention (Cobalt-60 by AECL and the Canadarm by MacDonald Dettwiler, for now anyway). I was very pleased to see that Wonderbra made the list but it was marketed by a Canadian firm for only four years before the company was sold to SaraLee.

To be fair, Bombardier with the Skidoo, and RIM hit the list at numbers 17 and 18 but I was once told to keep lists short and I didn’t have time to keep on researching. Here, then, for your edification and enjoyment are Canada’s top 15 inventions and where they ended up.

1. Insulin, Treatment for Diabetes [1921, Frederick Banting, Charles Best] - Marketed by Eli Lilly, U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant who made it big specifically as a result of insulin. (Read more on the discovery of insulin and its roots at MaRS.)
2. Telephone [1876, Alexander Graham Bell] - Conceived in Canada. Patented and marketed in the U.S. by National Bell Telephone Company.
3. Light Bulb [1874, Henry Woodward, Mathew Evans] - Unsuccessful at commercializing it. Sold their invention to Thomas Edison in 1879.
4. Five Pin Bowling [1908, Thomas F. Ryan] - Not a commercializable product
5. Wonderbra [1964, Louise Poirier] - First successfully commercialized in Canada by Canadian Lady – Canadelle but by 1968 the company had been sold to Sara Lee in the U.S.
6. Pacemaker [1950, John Hopps, Wilfred Bigelow, John Callaghan] - Among many contributors to development; successfully commercialized by U.S.-based Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. in 1972.
7. Robertson Screw, 1908 [Peter Robertson] - Sold almost entirely in Canada as the inventor refused to license the screws to anyone (including Ford) due to problems with the first licensee in the UK.
8. Zipper [1913, Gideon Sundback] - Not really invented in Canada: Sundback was a Swedish-born engineer working in the U.S. at the Hookless Fastener Company.
9. Electric Wheelchair [1952, George Klein] - No Canadian manufacturer stepped up to the plate to build them so the designs were sent to the U.S.
10. Poutine [1957, Fernand Lachance] - Not a commercializable product; actually not even a tasty one.
11. Cobalt-60 “Bomb” Cancer Treatment [1951, Harold Johns] - Commercialized still by AECL.
12. Java Programming Language [1994, James Arthur Gosling] - Done in the U.S. by a Canadian for Sun Microsystems.
13. Bloody Caesar [1969, Walter Chell] - Not a commercializable product, but this one is tasty. Who wouldn’t want to own this patent?
14. Canadarm [1975, Spar Aerospace/NRC] - Actually remained Canadian but may not remain so as MacDonald Detwiller tried to sell itself to a U.S. company this year.
15. Standard time [1878, Sir Sandford Fleming] - Not a commercializable product/

Experience Mars in a whole new way

If you could travel to Mars, would you? Even we at MaRS are interested.

Space jokes and anecdotes about the planet Mars are in circulation here, being our home planet and all. But this is pretty cool. The Science Centre is opening “Facing Mars,” a hands-on, interactive exhibition, on June 9th.

You can participate in a walk that subtracts 60 per cent of your weight, as it would be on Mars. You can experience some of the potential psychological and emotional stresses that astronauts face and see how contagious emotions can be. The goal of the exhibit is to have you reflect on the human toll of long space voyages as well as the complex engineering and science involved.

So get the kids or put back on that childish sense of curiousity yourself and head out for some science excitement on the OTHER Mars.

Medicine 2.0 Map

In part one of our Medicine 2.0 series, we talked about what Medicine 2.0 means. In this interview, Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, Senior Scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, talks about why Medicine 2.0 is so important and what factors make it relevant and pertinent to scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs.

Read on for the second in the Medicine 2.0 series of interviews with Dr. Eysenbach.


Why is Medicine 2.0 important?
For me, Web 2.0 in health and medicine (including Science 2.0) boils down to five important themes:

1. Social networking
2. Participation
3. Collaboration
4. Apomediation
5. Openness

All these themes are disruptive in that they have a fundamental and wide-ranging impact on how things are done currently in our sector.

Social networking sites (like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter) provide a place for relationships between groups of people with similar, specific interests. In our context, these groups of people might be:

• Consumers and patients rallying around a common health- or disease-related interest
• Researchers working on a common set of biomedical research problems (Nature Network)
• Health professionals working in a common setting, like a large hospital or a health-region.

Connecting individuals within and between these groups using Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, etc.), facilitate participation which almost automatically leads to collaboration.

Another theme which emerges from participation and collaboration is apomediation. This refers to Web 2.0’s ability to cut out the gatekeeper (or “disintermediate”) and replace the middleman with “apomediaries.” Apomediaries are peers and collaborators who “stand by” and guide users to high quality information, but are not prerequisites to obtain the information. The wisdom of the expert is partially replaced by collective intelligence or the wisdom of the crowd. In medicine as well as in science in general, where expertness is deeply ingrained in the system, this is a very disruptive proposition.

The last theme is openness, which is both a prerequisite and a result of these developments.

Talking about openness, do you mean open access? How is Medicine 2.0 different than open access?
Open access removes access barriers (price, copyright restrictions) from scientific literature, and it’s an important aspect of Medicine 2.0 because:

1. It facilitates the research and knowledge translation process
2. It provides for unexpected collaborations between researchers and knowledge users (patients/consumers, policy makers)
3. It provides the foundation for the next generation of knowledge aggregation and identification tools (I am thinking of intelligent tools that aggregate information from the literature – with overly restrictive copyright provisions this is impossible).

However, the openness theme in Medicine 2.0 goes beyond open access and also includes open peer review, open data sharing, openness in a sense of making previously hidden processes in research transparent to the public, and openness in terms of providing interfaces for technical interoperability between web services (providing APIs etc.).

Conducting convergence innovation

Creative Sparks was launched at MaRS on Wednesday, May 7, as a component of the Esprit Orchestra’s 2008 season and the New Wave Composers Festival. It was conceived by Esprit’s Music Director and Conductor, Alex Pauk, and it was an exemplary model of the themes that MaRS embraces: convergence, innovation, creativity and collaboration.

The project brought professional composers together with Toronto Area high school and middle school students to mentor the burgeoning compositional and performance talents. The idea was to stretch the boundaries between the students’ understanding of what orchestral music is and what it can become. Students were encouraged to consider the traditional sound of an orchestra being enhanced by technology, amplified sounds that would not usually be part of a score and MaRS as the performance platform.

The concert used the MaRS Atrium to its full capacity. Musicians were stationed on bridges and walkways, in the lower concourse and throughout the main floor spaces. It was surround sound at its finest. Over 180 student and professional musicians, 50 choir members and a host of proud parents, teachers and Esprit followers became an organic audience that moved with the sound — literally.

It was a night of Canadian and world premieres and collaboration was the theme for the evening. Nowhere was it more evident than in the moving Threnody composed by R. Murray Schafer. Originally written in 1966 as an anti-war protest, the spoken text comes from children’s eye-witness accounts of the atomic bombing of Nagaski. It is an uncomfortable work, juxtaposing young voices with mature themes from the string and brass sections. Improvisation from the orchestra leaves the audience torn between the hard truth of the words and the freedom of the music. Schafer updated Threnody in 2008 as a result of his participation in the Creative Sparks program working with the orchestra and choir of St. Elizabeth Catholic High School in Thornhill under the direction of John Lettieri.

Stay tuned for great sounds emerging from North Toronto Collegiate. Their stunning Themes and Variations was a collaborative effort of eight students under the mentorship of composer Scott Good. Duncan Jennings’ Theme became the sounding board for his fellow composer’s imaginations and wild ideas. Inserting electric guitar and percussion (sounding a lot like pots and pans crashing together) into a melodic string theme made for complicated and exciting music. Not exactly something you can hum along to but also not easily forgotten.

Two real treats of the evening were The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives and Falcon’s Trumpet, another composition by R. Murray Schafer. The Ives piece was played from the “pit” or the lower concourse of the MaRS Atrium. Here, the sound travelled brilliantly throughout the house as the strings played a consistent soft melody from below - then comes the trumpet played from high above on the 2nd floor bridge, followed by the flutes, clarinet and oboe that just seemed to come out of nowhere and move faster and louder as the piece went on. The Esprit Orchestra musicians and the student string performers from Claude Watson School of the Arts, North Toronto Collegiate and Etobicoke School of the Arts handled this delicate piece with ease. Falcon’s Trumpet was composed with featured trumpeter Stuart Laughton (one of the original members of the Canadian Brass) in mind. This dual of “birds” with the trumpet leading the charge starts with solo bars where you can picture the graceful arc of a bird soaring in the sky. Return calls from the other players make for a powerful back and forth as the struggle for power begins. Schafer refers to the piece as “non-synchronous” as if taking place outdoors where you cannot orchestrate the sounds and timing - with the orchestra placed throughout the entire MaRS atrium you felt like you were in the middle of something happening around you simply as an observer to something greater.

Congratulations to all involved in this unique and exciting converging of talents. By bringing new music to new spaces expands all of our minds as the lines of creativity are blurred and that fine line between art and science is less of a line. I hope that this is only the beginning for MaRS — home to Convergence Innovation — as an amazing venue for musicians to explore their creativity and debut new works.

There is one last chance to catch the Esprit Orchestra and the New Wave Composer’s Festival. On Sunday May 11th at the Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts 8:00pm Concert; 7:15 pm pre-concert composers talk. The special guest artist is Ryan Scott, percussion. The concert will also be recorded for a future broadcast on CBC Radio 2, The Signal and Sunday Afternoon in Concert.

What’s to become of the Rockefeller
gasoline legacy?

John D. Rockefeller is a Titan. And he’s shaking up the petroleum industry yet again.

Forever immortalized in contradictory terms; revolutionary industrialist, leader of the petroleum industry, ruthless robber baron, corporate innovator (holding companies to work around monopoly laws), target to anti-trust movement, innovator of modern charitable trusts, benevolent benefactor and the wealthiest man to ever live (inflation adjusted). Arguably one of the best business books ever written chronicled how this one man came to hold all of these titles. His legacy in the oil industry is immediately apparent when you consider the successor companies to the post-monopoly break-up of Standard Oil.

• Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ) - or Esso (S.O. or Eastern States, Standard Oil) - renamed Exxon, now part of ExxonMobil. Standard Trust companies Carter Oil, Imperial Oil (Canada), and Standard of Louisiana were kept as part of Standard Oil of New Jersey after the breakup.
• Standard Oil of New York - or Socony, merged with Vacuum - renamed Mobil, now part of ExxonMobil.
• Standard Oil of California - or Socal - renamed Chevron, became ChevronTexaco, but returned to Chevron.
• Standard Oil of Indiana - or Stanolind, renamed Amoco (American Oil Co.) - now part of BP.
• Standard’s Atlantic and the independent company Richfield merged to form Atlantic Richfield or ARCO, now part of BP. Atlantic operations were spun off and bought by Sunoco.
• Standard Oil of Kentucky - or Kyso was acquired by Standard Oil of California - currently Chevron.
• Continental Oil Company - or Conoco now part of ConocoPhillips.
• Standard Oil of Ohio - or Sohio now part of BP.
• The Ohio Oil Company - more commonly referred to as “The Ohio”, and marketed gasoline under the Marathon name. The company is now known as Marathon Oil Company, and was often a rival with the in-state Standard spinoff, Sohio.

To this day, the Rochefeller family remains a significant shareholder in many of these successor companies, which is why the family is again making news. Despite record profits in the petroleum industry, the Rockefeller family has publicly called on shareholders of ExxonMobil to join them in making changes to the company so that they can better maximize long-term shareholder value in a rapidly changing energy environment.

“Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, PhD economist, and great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of ExxonMobil, said: “In today’s rapidly changing energy environment, we are urging ExxonMobil to get back to its strong historical roots in order to better position itself for the future of its industry. ExxonMobil needs to reconnect with the forward-looking and entrepreneurial vision of my great- grandfather. Kerosene was the ‘alternative energy’ of its day when he realized that it could replace whale oil. Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing, early on, the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel. And as he noted: ‘If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.’ We recognize and appreciate that ExxonMobil’s management has been extremely skilled at managing the oil and natural gas business. However, the truth is that ExxonMobil is profiting in the short term from investments and decisions made many years ago, and by focusing on a narrow path that ignores the rapidly shifting energy landscape around the world, including developing nations.”
(Source: Clean Edge News)

Red Maple Leaves in the Sun by joesflickr

I just finished reading the latest report on Canada’s competitiveness (PDF) released by the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. The report describes our current state in 2008 and the outlook to 2020, and it’s troubling to see that even though our economic performance is among the strongest nations, we are trailing the US by a whopping $8,800 in GDP per capita.

So what does this mean?
It means that we have opportunities to improve the value we add to our human, physical and natural resources, that will in turn contribute to our national prosperity and standard of living.

The late management guru, Peter Drucker, spoke of the responsibilities of leaders:

Successful leaders don’t start out asking, “What do I want to do?” They ask, “What needs to be done?” Then they ask, “Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?” They don’t tackle things they aren’t good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others.

Entrepreneurs are a specific form of leader. They build new opportunities and with this in mind, I want to challenge those who are thinking along these lines to review the following list in search of inspiration for what needs to get done. Here are some specific areas of focus detailed by the report that relate to the investment in people and technology that will lead to improving Canada’s future prosperity:

• Invest in innovative ways to attack poverty (raise the valleys)
• Raise awareness among all Canadians of the benefits of education
• Continue investments in post secondary education
• Assess the trade-off between university research and teaching
• Step up investments in information and communication technology

We need to shed our complacency, and tap into the latent creative and innovative spirit that makes us Canadian. Serve yourself; serve your community; serve your country. Create a win-win-win situation.

At Wednesday’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture, attendees heard Dr. Peter Hofstra of Greenrock Asset Management talk about the cost/benefit analysis of a higher education. Talking from his own experience in transitioning from a PhD in Engineering Physics to a fund manager, he discussed the transferable skills that a PhD can give you.

But for the true entrepreneur (think Bill Gates or Michael Dell) often leaving a degree program to “just do it” is the better path. Based on the questions from the audience, it was clear that many people are torn about which way to go.

Question of the Week:
What advice do you have for a Masters graduate trying to decide whether or not to do a PhD program?

Downloads and Resources

• Webcast
• Class information
• ENT101 Facebook Group
• Presentation: “Specialization vs. Career Diversity” (PDF)

| View | Download the PDF

Inky with the latest CIX Award

Some very interesting companies could be found among the presenters at the Canadian Innovation Exchange event this week. It was great to see a range of companies hitting the stage. They included brand new players such as Sandy Ward, founder of local search startup Homezilla and the always colourful, angel investor and company builder Mark Dowd of Brainpark. Mark is building a peer to peer collaboration platform to tackle the very big and lucrative problem of managing knowledge within the enterprise. CIX also had a share of more established, venture-backed players such as Butch Langlois who presented the online travel site PlanetEye and Ron McKenzie, CEO of the online collaboration platform Octopz, a MaRS tenant.

Among many solid and “entertaining” presentations at CIX, Ron McKenzie and the Octopz team stood out as the choice of attendees when the votes were tabulated. They took home top honours for the best presenting company at the event. This win follows on the heels of the amazing debut of Octopz’s latest software at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week where over 10000 attendees packed the Moscone Centre to see the latest stuff.

One of the key trends that could be seen in San Francisco last week and here at CIX was the continued momentum that the dynamic web is creating for startups that have focused on building clever, utility applications for customers and investors. There is still a continued appetite for innovative, low weight software platforms that solve a very targeted customer problem and seek to connect dynamically to a host of other infrastructure and value added services.

Even the big players understand the implications of this trend towards infinite interoperability and this emerging fabric of user and corporate collaboration. Witness companies such as Yahoo who freely admit they don’t want to build yet another social network. Instead,Yahoo’s CTO told more than 1,000 attendees at the Moscone Centre last week that their strategy is to “build social into everything they do.” Yahoo’s big plan is to make it easier for users to share information about themselves with other Yahoo users and on websites that run applications using Yahoo features. It’s how they are seeking to keep pace with players such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. And it’s this kind of development that is helping companies like Octopz cost-effectively, quickly and powerfully extend its collaborative software platform in some wondrous ways. Stay tuned.

Prestigious award funds innovation

On Tuesday evening, the research and innovation community came to the MaRS Centre to celebrate the 2008 Premier’s Innovation Awards — three prestigious awards programs that support and promote ideas and discoveries that build on Ontario’s innovation strengths. The Premier’s Innovation Awards include the Premier’s Catalyst, Discovery and Summit Awards. The Premier’s Summit Award program is administered by MaRS on behalf of the Province.

Premier Dalton McGuinty and Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson joined MaRS Board Chair John Evans and our CEO, Ilse Treurnicht to celebrate some of the best and brightest minds in Ontario’s research and innovation community.

These award programs are a key part of Ontario’s strategy to attract and retain our best and brightest and build on our culture of innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Premier Dalton McGuinty. “By supporting world-class talent here at home, we’re ensuring Ontario remains the place to be for years to come.”

The 2008 recipients of the award are:

• Dr. Stephen Scherer, Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and Professor at the University of Toronto
• Dr. Frances Shepherd, Senior Staff Physician and Group Leader for the Lung Cancer site at Princess Margaret Hospital, University Heath Network.

The Premier’s Summit Award recognizes researchers that have made a substantial and distinguished contribution to medical research in Ontario, and show promise to do even more. It’s a $25 million program that provides extraordinary support to a small number of outstanding medical researchers, helping attract them to or retain them in Ontario and enabling them to significantly expand their research programs.

Each recipient receives $5 million over a five-year period, derived from a $2.5 million contribution from the Award program matched by $2.5 million from the sponsoring institution. The selections are made by an internationally distinguished panel from the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

I agree with Ilse when she said: “The extraordinary achievements of this year’s winners stand for remarkable creativity, excellence and a bright future for our province. Without doubt, by investing in their talents we will make a difference in the world, and we should all be proud that these pioneering research and innovation leaders live and work in Ontario.”

This year’s winners join the 2007 recipients:

• Dr. John Dick, University Health Network
• Dr. Tak Mak, Princess Margaret Hospital, University Health Network
• Dr. Anthony Pawson, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hopital
• Dr. Peter St George-Hyslop, University of Toronto and University Health Network

In his acceptance speech, Steve Scherer said, “I am indebted to the Ontario government, the taxpayers of Ontario and the Hospital for Sick Children for entrusting with me these funds that will allow me the freedom to conduct experiments that typically I can only dream about. I am beholden to all of you to make the next five years the most creative and productive of my career.”

The research focus of the six Award recipients spans from lung cancer research, to genomics, to Alzheimer’s disease. They are all poised to do more groundbreaking work and their contributions have the potential to improve human health worldwide.

MaRS will be holding a panel discussion with past and present Summit Award winners about the impact of medical discoveries on health outcomes at “Science at the Summit” on May 27, 2008 between noon-2pm. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. David Naylor, President, University of Toronto.

For more on the event, and the Premier’s Summit Award program, visit www.marsdd.com/premiersummit

Watch the Videos of the Award Winners

Dr. Frances Shepherd:

Dr. Stephen Sherer:

Get involved: volunteer week

With the current awareness around community involvement and volunteering, especially since this week is Volunteer Week, many businesses are interested in contributing to their local community through a group volunteer experience. They look to volunteerism as an alternative to the traditional team-building exercise or charitable gift donation, where a meaningful volunteer experience helps improve motivation and teamwork skills among employees. But an employee-supported volunteer program can also help increase corporate visibility and highlight a corporate commitment to social responsibility in the community.

Volunteer Toronto has established the Employee Supported Volunteer Program (ESVP) to help bridge these business interests with the needs of non-profit agencies.

Volunteer Toronto receives a wide range of requests, from companies new to corporate volunteering, to those with specific interests and activities in mind. As a first step, companies can ask their employees what types of activities and causes they are interested in and what time of the year they can participate. Our website, volunteertoronto.ca is a great resource to search volunteer opportunities in the Toronto area. For groups of 20 or more, Volunteer Toronto can assist with planning event activities and logistics with non-profit agencies. A three-month lead time is an ideal timeframe to help plan and execute a successful volunteer experience.

For ideas on how to get involved, visit the Volunteer Toronto blog to view pictures of previous corporate volunteer events.