Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC) received $15 million from FedDev Ontario “to promote new sustainable innovations and bring business support to Eastern Ontario in Canada.” Along with partners the St. Lawrence Corridor Economic Development Commission and St. Lawrence College, BIC will establish the Ontario Bioindustrial Innovation Network (OBIN), a hybrid chemistry cluster in Brockville, Ontario. The network aims to…
In a policy paper for Ontario360, Sean Speer and Jamison Steeve argue that business support programs don’t stand up to cost-benefit analysis. But other researchers say their arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny.
The latest report from The Impact Centre at the University of Toronto, titled The Myth of a Better Mousetrap, offers some striking observations on Canada’s competitive shortcomings and makes several radical suggestions to improve our performance.
Tech clusters and Canadian cities with top tech markets attract the country’s fastest-scaling tech firms, according to research. But Canadian SMEs continue to face challenges scaling up.
According to Narwhal List 2018 of Canadian private companies in technology, 2017 was so successful in attracting VC money that 2018 might see a few “narwhals” possibly maturing to become “unicorns.”
Toronto is the only Canadian city on the short list of 20 metropolitan areas that Amazon.com Inc is considering for its second headquarters in North America, dubbed HQ2.
Innovation in Canada will be seriously compromised unless domestic venture capitalists start throwing big bucks into Canadian firms, suggests a new report. Big funding is one of the secrets of success of US firms, whether in Silicon Valley, or in other technology hubs in the rest of the US. In contrast, it is a challenge to get large funding tranches from Canadian VCs.
A report from the University of Toronto’s Impact Centre is calling for a data-driven approach to maximizing the government’s investments in Canadian firms and growing them to be world-class. The report — Government Venture Capital: Can the Public Sector Pick and Nurture World Class Companies? — says that the strategy for venture capital investments of the Canadian government is not to simply copy what venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are doing.
The creation of two large funds aimed at scaling high-growth tech firms is among the recommendations contained in the second wave of reports from the Advisory Council on Economic Growth. The funds would target what the panel describes as bottlenecks in the innovation ecosystem – early- and expansion-stage companies as well as established small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with high impact potential.
