Getting entrepreneurship down to a science
More and more science students with inventive ideas are hoping to start businesses, and they're looking for help from Canadian universities
by Tim Johnson
It was the first warm Saturday morning in March, and one could safely bet that many students were basking in the sun or rolling over for a couple more hours in bed. But at the University of Waterloo, hundreds of them, well-coiffed and dressed for success, showed up early and packed the school's William G. Davis Centre for a day of seminars and activities organized by the student leadership of Waterloo's undergraduate science and business program. The sold-out conference, called "The Driving Force: From Science to Business," included talks on networking, commercialization, and how to launch your own start-up. In the afternoon - just before dividing into teams that would compete to invent a new product and then sell it to a panel of judges - the students were asked to raise their hand if they were hoping to start a business or be otherwise entrepreneurial. Fully one-third did so.
There's a genuine and growing interest in entrepreneurship and the commercialization of ideas among Canadian science students, says Anne Swift, president of Young Inventors International, a nonprofit organization that provides education, networking and practical help to student entrepreneurs and innovators. A plurality of Young Inventors' 1,300 individual members are Canadian, nine in 10 are students, and 80 percent of those are either science or engineering students (see "Smart site for young inventors" on the following page).
But the challenge, she says, is getting Canadian institutions on board in a comprehensive way, by providing a breadth of programs, centralized support and networking opportunities to students who want to be entrepreneurial. Ms. Swift, (now a doctoral candidate in the strategy, entrepreneurship and technological change program at Carnegie Mellon University), founded Young Inventors in 2001, when she was a second-year economics student at the University of Western Ontario and couldn't find any practical resources to help her secure a patent on a flexible keyboard.
Young Inventors hosted three conferences for young inventors and entrepreneurs in Toronto, but had a better reception after its latest was held in Boston earlier this year. "Since our conference at MIT, my phone has been ringing off the hook," says Ms. Swift. "In the U.S. we've found a very significant interest in what we're doing, and so the faculty and administrators and people running business plan competitions are calling us. In Canada, it's really been about us trying to find the right individual at an institution that is receptive and open, and that's been a very big challenge."
Canadian schools are starting to provide resources for students and introducing relevant programs (some are described later in this article), but faculty members who are active in the entrepreneurial game say the institutions have a long way to go to catch up to the best that the U.S. has to offer.
Perhaps it's not surprising that Young Inventors has had a harder time making institutional connections north of the border, since Canada has had its own problems in the area of entrepreneurship and commercialization. "We've developed everything from insulin to geographic information systems to space technology, and they end up being commercialized or marketed or produced and developed somewhere else, usually in the United States," observes Harvey Silverstein, whose PhD is in science, technology and international affairs.
"It's simply because we don't have the culture and some of the infrastructure that propels scientists and enables them to commercialize and build upon their scientific and technological breakthroughs," continues Dr. Silverstein, who directed the executive MBA program at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary's University before returning to the private sector this summer.
Commercialization doesn't lend itself easily to measurement, but some indicators give a sense of how Canada compares with its major trading partners. The World Economic Forum ranked Canadian businesses 27th overall in their propensity to compete on the basis of unique products or processes rather than low-cost labour or raw materials (cited in the recent report to the federal government of the Expert Panel on Commercialization of University Research). Ontario's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity has shown that Canada trails the U.S. in patent output, an important measure of commercialization, with 60 percent fewer patents granted per 10,000 employees.
People in the field say the "disconnect" between research and business creation that prevails in the wider Canadian society is often reflected on Canadian campuses. "Most academic institutions don't have a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation," says Luc Lalande, director of Carleton University's innovation transfer office. "It's not like at Stanford or MIT, where students with ideas are actually nurtured and supported in various ways. If you've got a neat idea on those campuses, it's almost expected that you're going to do something with it."
Brian Courtney, a Canadian and now an internal medicine resident at the University of Toronto, found that the help he received from Stanford University was very helpful in being able to produce and market a medical device that he invented with two other students while enrolled there in a master's program in electrical engineering. Their "Rinspiration System," which simultaneously rinses and aspirates a blood vessel before a stent is inserted, is now used by cardiologists across the U.S. Like many young entrepreneurs, the students accumulated tens of thousands in credit-card debt and lived on peanut butter sandwiches in the process, but in a very short time they garnered the capital and regulatory approval they needed to produce and sell the technology.
Dr. Courtney says individuals at Stanford played an integral role by introducing him and his team to potential mentors in San Francisco's thriving biomedical community. "We were very lucky, as three engineering students who were very wet behind the ears, to have world-class physicians and entrepreneurs involved with us from the get-go," says Dr. Courtney. "They were critical."
Money, money
Predictably, some of the problem for Canada boils down to dollars and cents. The much larger U.S. population translates into a bigger market, huge sources of government funding, more investors and more venture capital. Comparing Ontario with California and Massachusetts, two states that are also economic powerhouses, Ontario's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity found that in 2003, roughly $400 of venture capital was invested per capita in those two states, compared with roughly $100 in Ontario (see related article, "Survey reports Canadian tech transfer.").
Many people also see a cultural divide between Canada and the U.S. when it comes to entrepreneurship. This is harder to quantify, but the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (in a report prepared by researchers from HEC Montréal and UBC's Sauder School of Business) found that eight percent of adults in Canada took part in entrepreneurial activity, compared with 11.9 percent in the U.S.; Canada ranked much closer to Norway, at 7.5 percent, or Ireland, at 8.1.
Dr. Silverstein in Halifax says that mixing science and commerce is often seen as perverse in Canada, whereas in the U.S. the opposite is often true - academic science and the business world partner up in a big way. Also, scientists in Canada aren't rewarded to the same extent by their peers, says Dr. Silverstein, or seen as positively "if they decide to take something out of the laboratory and try to make a commercial success of it."
Cultural differences are also cited by David Brener, director of research translation programs for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He says U.S. investors, both public and private, are more aggressive and invest more heavily, while Canada is content to produce top-quality knowledge for the rest of the world to use. "For too long, we have been very happy to be slapped on the back and told how clever we are," says Dr. Brener. "We have to learn how to lead and be proud of it."
Many in the innovation field are convinced that more commercialization could bring unlimited benefits to Canadian society, including more jobs, more wealth for the country and a greater competitive advantage internationally. Owen Ward, professor of microbial biotechnology and director of the University of Waterloo's science and business undergraduate program, says universities need to develop entrepreneurial skills, like risk-taking and acting quickly on ideas, so that Canada can stay competitive.
"We need to encourage that in our students," he says, "because before most of them are 35, the order of economies is going to be: China number one, India number two and the U.S. number three. Is that ever going to have a significant impact on North America and Canada!"
Universities' role
Many players are involved in nurturing and developing entrepreneurship, from university leaders to business scions to investors and even consumers, whose demand for better products and services also fuels innovation. What is the specific role of universities in strengthening the beginnings of entrepreneurial education in the sciences?
Different strategies will work for different institutions, and changes will take place slowly, predicts Ms. Swift of Young Inventors International: "It's about moving incrementally towards something that's a bit more radical."
Mr. Lalande of Carleton's innovation transfer office says students need courses that are relevant to entrepreneurship, as well as support beyond the coursework to help them gain momentum. Deans should involve the community, so that students can find mentors and gain experience, and they shouldn't shy away from hiring faculty with a background in business. "It really depends on a few champions within these universities and colleges," he says, "to start new programs or deliver courses that are entrepreneurship-relevant."
Brian Guthrie, director of innovation and knowledge management for the Conference Board of Canada, says Canada needs graduates who become entrepreneurs as well as people whose scientific research skills mesh with an understanding of the market and of consumers, so they can work in science-based industries like biotechnology. For him, work placements are the most important part of the mix. "First and foremost, universities should help students get real-live placements in real-live business environments."
Perhaps the best example of a meeting place for science, business and practical experience at the undergraduate level is in the University of Waterloo's science and business (or SciBus) undergraduate program. Dr. Ward, its director, holds half-a-dozen U.S. patents and has spun off three companies from his research since coming to Waterloo almost 20 years ago.
In the program, business is woven onto a core science base, and students can major in biotechnology/chartered accountancy, biotechnology/economics, or simply science and business. Waterloo's well-known co-op program is a chief component of SciBus. By the time a student graduates, says Dr. Ward, he or she will have finished five or six different placements and gained a diversity of experience, from laboratory science to marketing and mixtures in between. Students also benefit from the university's Research and Technology Park. It includes the Accelerator Centre, a facility created for the purpose of nurturing innovation and commercialization.
While there aren't many undergraduate programs like Waterloo's, several MBA programs mix science and business - including those at Queen's, Waterloo, York, Western, Acadia, and the universities of Saskatchewan and New Brunswick (Saint John). Simon Fraser University's graduate program in management of biotechnology in the Segal Graduate School of Business grew out of industry need, explains Michael Parent, professor and academic director of MBA programs at Simon Fraser. Biotech is big on the B.C. lower mainland, he says, so links with the business community are close and networking opportunities abound.
For students with an idea that they're ready to launch, Carleton University offers the Foundry Program. The Foundry gives small grants to undergraduate and graduate students and even to faculty, in science as well as other disciplines, to take their idea to the next level, and it introduces inventors to people in the industry. While it may not match what a creative student might expect to receive in the U.S., says Mr. Lalande, at least it provides much-needed encouragement and can feed a larger culture of entrepreneurship. "We want people to act on their ideas," he says. "They may not all start companies after graduation, but we've already planted the seed that may awaken their entrepreneurial ambitions later on in their career."
On a larger scale, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research last year launched the Science to Business (S2B) program, a series of grants designed to address the gap between research discoveries and their commercialization. The program provides universities with funding to allow several PhD graduates in the life sciences to pursue an MBA. In its first year, four business schools - at Toronto, Western, Simon Fraser and Saskatchewan - were granted funds to support three candidates each, and the program was re-launched with fresh funds and a new call for applications earlier this year.
In Atlantic Canada, the Acadia Centre for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, an affiliate of Acadia University, is trying to address another issue: how to integrate entrepreneurship into the university reward system to encourage more faculty to take part. "We know that faculty are driven by the factors that affect promotion and tenure," says Chris Pelham, the centre's executive director. "That equates to research."
Founded in 1988, the centre is slowly gaining acceptance in Acadia's halls. It presents lectures on entrepreneurial and business skills, runs contests, and offers a credit course on the theory and practice of entrepreneurship that's open to any student in any faculty. Mr. Pelham says the strategies for encouraging faculty participation include finding ways to give more weight to teaching and service in tenure and promotion decisions for professors involved in the centre; defining entrepreneurship to include social and community enterprise; and relying on champions who believe entrepreneurial skills are important to graduates.
Often, though, teaching entrepreneurship is more about inspiration than instruction. Dr. Ward of Waterloo says entrepreneurship in universities is about liberty, creativity and freedom of thought. "Students need to be freed up from the chains of exams and evaluations," he says, "so they can express themselves and not always be constrained by someone else's expectations - which is what exams are all about."
Back at the Waterloo conference for entrepreneurial students, as fellow student volunteers pack up the display booths from the industry exhibition and wearily sweep up the detritus of a very busy day, the Science and Business Student Association president and event co-chair, Ryan McCartney, concludes that the conference has been a success.
"People have ideas, but they're sometimes a little intimidated to take action," he explains. "I think this conference informed people [how] science and business are integrated, and inspired people to move forward with their ideas. We went from networking to food product development to how to sell as a scientist. I think we really encouraged people to think, 'Yeah, I have a good idea, and I think there's potential for that idea to go somewhere.'"
Smart site for young inventors
Young Inventors International is a made-in-Canada resource that's attracting would-be inventors and entrepreneurs from around the world. All three of its executives are Canadian - founding president Anne Swift, chief development officer Ralph Baddour, and strategic liaison officer Bryan Watson.
Young Inventors has just begun offering institutional memberships to NGOs, high schools, colleges and universities for $1,500 a year. The fee allows an institution's students to access Young Inventors resources at no additional charge. The students may compete in contests and challenges, learn about investor networks, and tap into mentorship networks for reviewing business plans. "The greatest expertise comes from those who have been there and done that," says Ms. Swift.
One of the most-used resources is its compendium of online modules on such topics as intellectual property, social entrepreneurship, market analysis and research, and working with suppliers. Students can also take part in webinars with experts for each module.
Member institutions' programs and courses that might interest inventors and entrepreneurs are also highlighted on the site. (McMaster University was one of the first universities to sign up for corporate membership, a precursor to institutional membership.) The website is www.younginventorsinternational.com.
