Innovative Partnerships

Canada's Most Innovative Partnerships

The first generation of quantum devices, among them lasers and semiconductor-based transistors, brought on a technological revolution in the early 2000s and transformed society forever. Today, a new generation of quantum technology is emerging that will help make the world an even safer, faster, and more productive place.

New quantum sensors will be among the first quantum technologies to market. Their precision and sensitivity will help peer into the tiniest features of the world more deeply than anything before. These sensing technologies will hold the promise of helping to solve disease, will build resilience against cyber attacks, and help secure the Internet of Things.

Under the National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Internet of Things: Quantum

Sensors Challenge program, top quantum scientists at the NRC and the University of Waterloo (uWaterloo) are collaborating to develop such disruptive sensors and make them a reality. This means getting them out of the lab and into the field for testing, and eventually adapting them for daily use.

The joint research teams are harnessing the extreme sensitivity of quantum systems to make these super-delicate, fragile sensors robust and compact — and build them into chips to be used in all our smart devices.

Many of these collaborative projects will create enabling technologies, such as new methods for transporting information that is encoded in photons into solid-state spins. This will help enable delicate networks of quantum sensors and other next-generation quantum applications.

The collaboration brings together the NRC’s quantum photonics talent and facilities for building state-of-the-art integrated optics with the researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and students of the uWaterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

Canadians will begin seeing these sensors in action in the very near future. In health care, they might drive new imaging capabilities for studying eye disorders or measuring brain activity. On the road or the battlefield, LiDAR systems, like those in self-driving vehicles, will use photons to measure position and velocity more precisely with less light needed. And in mining, sensors could detect new underground mineral deposits.

Together, our researchers will engineer the next generation quantum sensors.

Canada.

Manager: Anna Sibiga Senior Project Manager: Karim Jooma Country Manager: Nina Theodorlis

This article was supported by the National Research Council of

Dr. Aimee Gunther Deputy Director, Internet of Things: Quantum Sensors Challenge program, National Research Council of Canada

How to Create Future Changemakers? Give Them Real-World Experience

The University of Calgary’s Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking is bridging the gap between students and the new economy nationwide.

Katherine Cappellacci

One of the biggest issues that innovation ventures face is a lack of easy accessibility to skilled talent. Establishing firm connections with talented individuals opens doors for collaboration, economic development, and continued prosperity for Canada. That’s why the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking offers many immersive talent experiences and workshops along with its social innovation and entrepreneurship training programs. They instill students from all disciplines with strong collaboration and problem-solving skills, resiliency, and a forward-thinking mindset that’s ready to grow and affect change to create a better future.

The Hunter Hub creates, inspires, and supports future changemakers through its diverse curriculum, extracurricular, and experiential learning activities and programs. They build innovation initiatives across campus and beyond. They understand the new economy’s needs, which is why they strive to build a community of interdisciplinary innovators within the university while connecting with talent outside it.

Honing future-ready skills

A new national initiative, Experience Ventures, is geared toward doing just that by giving students the chance to make an impact alongside real-world innovators. For aspiring student changemakers, these opportunities help to demystify and increase accessibility to the innovation community nationwide.

Led by the Hunter Hub, Experience Ventures is a national initiative that has partnerships with eight other top Canadian universities so far. Having just launched in July, it’s had over 2,000 students participate in a wildly successful pilot year.

“Our students are matched with early-stage startups and social ventures. Together they work to solve a defined realworld problem and build a solution,” says Keri Damen, the Executive Director of the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking. “Plus, students are paid for their experience, eradicating any potential financial barriers and increasing access to innovation opportunities from all backgrounds.”

With flexible working models, participants have a certain number of hours they must fulfill, and projects can be tackled as individuals or in teams. Students can apply what they’re learning in the classroom while

integrating into local innovation ecosystems and building their networks.

Advance your career

“We want to keep our brightest student innovators in our local communities supporting startups,” Keri adds. “Our students are getting hired by these ventures after the program ends.” Plus, the initiative was specially designed to reach rural and underrepresented communities, ensuring that the future of innovation is diverse in thought and representation by being accessible to everyone.

Experience Ventures opportunities are open to students from 14 faculties at UCalgary and its partner universities — encouraging cross-discipline team building and mutual respect. Everyone gains experience in transferrable skills that will be useful in any industry, including risk management, collaboration, and the ability to spot opportunities.

The university is actively looking for more partnerships to make this program available to more students. “The University of Calgary is on a very exciting trajectory in innovation,” Keri explains. Offering initiatives like Experience Ventures is why the school ranks number one for research-based startups in Canada amongst university institutions.

Building Canada’s innovation economy

The University of Calgary is also the youngest school to be ranked as one of the top five research universities in the country. The institution believes that research forms the necessary foundation for innovation and economic development. Not only are they finding that more students are going into innovation, researchers are now also increasingly considering the real-world impact their research might have. This crossover into entrepreneurship ensures that the school’s innovation ecosystem will continue to grow and thrive.

Experience Ventures gives students the sense of community that’s been lacking during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through their upcoming Experience Ventures National Hackathon. Collaborating with interdisciplinary teams, participants will work with industry experts to solve a problem — this one being wellness. Students will build networks, test solutions, and learn how to strategize. The top teams compete at a national competition for $5,000 worth of cash prizes.

Visit experienceventures.ca to learn more. The Hunter Hub is helping to build Canada’s bright, diverse future of innovation.

This article was sponsored by the University of Calgary.

P H O T O C

Keri Damen Executive Director, The Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking

Loyalist Leads the Way in Fostering Innovative Bioeconomy Partnerships

Could food “waste” be used in natural beauty products? What are the opportunities for horticulture in deep space exploration? What secrets does the genome hold for the future of farming? As industry becomes increasingly concerned with sustainable development, Loyalist College is working to answer these questions through applied research in the bioeconomy.

Over the last five years, Loyalist College has transformed itself into a destination for applied research, rooted in strong relationships with community and industry partners. Located in Belleville, Ont., between major producer markets in Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, the College has aligned its programming with the evolution of the local agriculture and manufacturing sectors as they pursue renewable resourcing — from vertical farming and sustainable building supplies to circular food economics and new cosmetic formulations.

“At Loyalist College, we are deeply connected to our industry and community partners and know that we have an important role to play in driving regional economic growth and development,” said Dr. Ann Marie Vaughan, President and CEO of Loyalist College. “The innovative partnerships and synergies we are developing across natural products and the bioeconomy will benefit regional employers while also providing Loyalist students with unparalleled work-integrated learning opportunities. It has been truly remarkable to see the many ways in which our students and employees are lending their talents to our growing network of

partners and demonstrating how being small gives us the power to do big things.”

Tapping into the regional innovation network

Loyalist College’s Applied Research and Innovation Office has launched a series of partnerships to bring new sustainable products and processes to market — driving a new generation of social and economic development in the process.

Case in point: Canadian natural beauty company Afiya Beauty hoped to address one of its customer’s top requests — an all-natural product that helps fade skin discolouration. Traditionally, skin care companies rely on harsh de-pigmenting agents to treat dark spots. Afiya worked with Loyalist College and GreenCentre Canada, dynamic partners in applied research and industry, for formulation expertise. Afiya is now testing and formulating new products to create a de-pigmenting cream that meets customer demands and matches its all-natural ethos.

Leveraging each other’s expertise

With its mission to support sustainable chemistry and advanced material startups, GreenCentre Canada is the perfect ally for the College. Together, their focus is offering support for small- and medium-sized enterprises and multinationals who wish to transform their products, processes, and services.

“The idea is to enhance the service offerings that Loyalist College and GreenCentre have to support companies that are developing new sustainable technologies,

specifically in the bioproducts sector,” says Fatme Dahcheh, GreenCentre Canada’s Director of Business Development.

Alongside GreenCentre Canada, Loyalist College’s Centre for Natural Products and Medical Cannabis have used GreenCentre Canada’s CONNECT program to help seven companies grow and develop their technologies and products.

“Loyalist College has been fantastic to work with,” says Dahcheh. “Both organizations want to support innovative companies who are developing sustainable technologies, so we’re able to really leverage each other’s expertise and funding opportunities.”

Launching big ideas locally and beyond

Nowhere is this opportunity to connect local strengths with global challenges more evident than in Loyalist’s innovative new partnership with Ontario Genomics and Canadore College, which will mobilize DNA information to create advances in natural product development and research.

“Loyalist College is a very avant-garde college,” says Bettina Hamelin, President and CEO of Ontario Genomics. “We’ve been working with Loyalist and Canadore to unify genomics-based applied research, education, and training across the province. Loyalist is really working at the forefront of these emerging and game-changing technologies.”

As with all the College’s applied research partnerships, the goal is to help drive industry evolution while providing students with exceptional work-integrated learning experiences.

Students in programs including Culinary Skills and Management, Cannabis Applied Science, Horticulture, and more can help solve real-world problems that small businesses are grappling with.

At the intersection of industry demand and research potential, these “local to global” partnerships represent the key to how Loyalist College is unlocking the future of Canada’s bioeconomy.

Medical research has always been an all-hands-on-deck proposition. Innovative new developments and discoveries that save lives and improve outcomes can originate in many places, from public hospitals to private industry. But the backbone of the research initiatives that engender transformative understanding and treatment for critical diseases like cancer remains our universities.

In Kingston, Queen’s University is a long-standing regional powerhouse of medical research, continually bringing forth incredible innovations in both the most fundamental scientific areas of inquiry and the very practical endeavours of clinical trials and treatment.

“Queen’s is a research-intensive university that provides outstanding research training experiences across diverse disciplines,” says Queen's University’s Vice-Principal Research, Dr. Nancy Ross. “It offers up a unique environment where interdisciplinary foundational research, clinical practice and knowledge mobilization for improved care and health outcomes takes place in a compact setting. New standards of care brought to light through research in realworld clinical settings can swiftly improve the patient experience and patient outcomes in our local hospitals and beyond.”

From campus to clinic: it’s a shorter journey than you might think Directly across from Queen’s University’s

iconic arboretum sits the Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC), Southeastern Ontario's largest acute-care academic hospital. And right beside it, the offices of the Canadian Cancer Trials Group. It is here that the country’s top medical experts gather, with the support of investigators across Canada, to answer the biggest questions about how we can collaborate to create real tangible progress on cancer outcomes.

And it is very much a collaboration, as exemplified in ExCELLirate Canada, a new framework for exploring the promising applications of cell therapy research across a wide variety of cancers and other illnesses. “ExCELLirate came about because of a mutual realization that there really is a lot of cell therapy expertise in Canada, but to a large extent, we had previously been functioning as islands,” says Clinician-Scientist Dr. Annette Hay, Associate Professor at Queen’s and Hematology Division Head at KHSC. “We realized that leveraging each other's expertise and the resources already in place across the country, making sure we were not duplicating efforts, is the fastest, most efficient way to advance our scientific goals, which are all focused on improving the lives of people with cancer.”

The ExCELLirate program is focused on pulling down barriers of funding, time, and siloed knowledge, clearing the path for astonishing advances in cell therapy

to become accessible and implementable around the country. The science of cell therapy, which empowers the body’s own immune system to fight cancer with personalized medicine, is truly game changing. But those who need it most can’t afford to wait. “The potential is very real and there is urgency here,” says Dr. Hay. “Cell therapy treatment has been proven to work. It has cured some patients in whom all other treatments — including bone marrow transplant, chemotherapy, and radiation — failed. The big challenge is figuring out how to make it affordable and accessible for the patients who need it and that's the focus of ExCELLirate Canada research.”

In this, as in every aspect of medical research, it is our universities that provide the agile hubs of scientific expertise and applied ingenuity that make collaborative progress possible. “Our universities congregate creative and talented people who, together with their trainees, conduct curiosity-driven and applied research which contributes to improved patient care and quality of life,” says Ross. “A continued commitment by Canadian universities and their affiliated hospitals to research and training of the next generation in the full range of health research from cell to society is foundational to the improved health of Canadians."

This article was sponsored by Loyalist College.

Visit loyalistcollege.com to learn more.

Loyalist College has taken a leadership role in the bioeconomy sector through a series of innovative partnerships.

Dr. Annette Hay Associate Professor, Queen's & Hematology Division Head, KHSC

Nancy Ross VP Research, Queen's University

Ground-breaking cancer treatment innovations like cell therapy are extraordinarily complex endeavours. It takes expertise from every corner of Canada to bring these scientific revolutions to the bedside. Queen’s University is where collaboration begins.

D.F. McCourt

sponsored by Queen's University.

PHOTO COURTESY OF QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY

uOttawa and IBM Join Forces with Exciting New Partnership

There’s a major cybersecurity skills gap in Canada. The data varies, but reports show roughly three to four million unfilled jobs in that field. Trained cybersecurity professionals are desperately needed to fill the void.

The forthcoming Cyber Range, located within the University of Ottawa’s Cyber Hub on the 5th floor of the STEM Complex, is a multi-year partnership between the University of Ottawa (uOttawa) and IBM Canada and is a giant step in the right direction. The Cyber Range will provide a full sensory-immersive and interactive training setting for visitors to experience true-to-life cyber response scenarios, in a full-scale security operations center (SOC) based on a fusion team model. The Cyber Range will further enable state-of-the-art research and training in cybersecurity and cybersafety while facilitating collaboration between government, industry, and academia.

A unique collaboration

The uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range will be the first of its kind in Canada and is being built with a $27 million investment by uOttawa and IBM. This latest partnership comes after years of fruitful collaboration between uOttawa and IBM

“We have a long history with IBM,” says Dr. Guy-Vincent Jourdan, Co-Director of the uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range and a Professor in uOttawa’s Faculty of Engineering. “IBM has

been working with several of us at uOttawa, my team in particular, for the past 13 years.”

Dr. Jourdan’s work with IBM is research focused, highlighting uOttawa’s position among the top 10 research universities in Canada. The University has long promoted dynamic research collaborations and it has leveraged Ottawa’s government laboratories, industry, and policymakers. Its latest partnership with IBM will continue to facilitate these connections.

“It felt natural for us to partner with uOttawa to bring the Cyber Range training to the university landscape,” says Dr. Vio Onut, Co-Director of the uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range and a Senior Manager at IBM. “We wish to accomplish two things: to start training students on cybersecurity and to enhance the scenarios that we have, because whenever you have a joint effort between two complementary partners from industry and academia, you always come up with better results.”

From training to professional development

The new Cyber Range will be a fully immersive and experiential-based facility that will enable state-of-the-art research and training in cybersecurity and cybersafety. Students, working professionals from government or industry, and other partners and clients will have the opportunity to use the Cyber Range on campus to learn, train, and upskill techniques, methods, and approaches in a

world-class environment. The Cyber Range activities and operations are supported by simulation rooms, a broadcast room, a command room, and multi-purpose space for hosting visitors.

The relationship between government, industry, and academia is essential. “Without this intersection, we’re basically spinning our wheels,” says Dr. Jourdan. “For us, it’s critical to be connected to industry and government so that our research can be oriented toward real problems that they experience.”

The Cyber Range will also create immense opportunities for interdisciplinary activities in training and research, bringing together numerous faculties and disciplines across uOttawa. “An enterprise-wide cybersecurity attack is not only handled by the technical team. Of course, there’s an incident response team that has an IT focus, but there are other important functions of the business that are also involved, including public relations, communications, human resources, legal, privacy, line of business, and more,” says Dr. Onut. All of these teams must work together as a fusion team to ensure a quick and efficient business response to preserve customer loyalty and trust, protect critical data, and maintain business operations.

The Cyber Range will help fill the training and skills gap in cybersecurity in Canada, and will offer training in both official languages. It will be operated collaboratively by uOttawa and IBM.

Flash Forest, which is on track to use drones to plant one billion trees by 2028. Mission from MaRS has curated teams of experts to troubleshoot the issues these businesses cannot solve alone: outdated regulations, overly risk-averse investors or cumbersome government procurement processes. With more than 50 industry experts from such organizations as OMERS, Maple Leaf Foods, RBC, KPMG, and Shopify, the coalitions are working to clear stumbling blocks from the cleantech companies’ routes to market so they can start mitigating climate change at scale.

Will it work? The early signs are promising. In December, Mission from MaRS signed an accelerated procurement process with the City of Toronto, which will support Canadian innovation and help Canada’s largest city reach its net-zero targets.

Imagine being able to repair damaged organs by printing replacement human tissues. In November, scientists at Toronto’s McEwen Stem Cell Institute announced a partnership to do just that. Working with Aspect Biosystems, a Vancouver biotech company, they’re developing a way to “bioprint” functional tissues that could eventually be implanted into patients to treat liver disease.

It’s a milestone for Medicine by Design, a University of Toronto organization that aims to accelerate progress in regenerative medicine by cross-pollinating ideas among academia, health care institutions, and industry. Using an approach based on a design studio, it brings multidisciplinary teams together to collaborate freely. Medicine by Design has been instrumental in charting the first-ever map of the liver at the cellular level and is now playing a leading role in the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort to

map every cell in the human body.

There’s a growing realization that technical advancements can only go so far when it comes to tackling complex issues like providing health care to an aging population, dealing with climate change, and addressing inequality. The biggest hurdles lie in getting new innovations into widespread use — this is something that only collaboration among government, academia and industry can solve.

This is how the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine is working to bridge the commercialization gap for cell and gene therapies. Its team focuses on key bottlenecks to accelerate the translation of scientific discovery into marketable products for patients.

And that’s the approach we’re taking at my own organization, where we launched Mission from MaRS to support ten scaling businesses that we believe can be Canada’s climate champions. These include StormFisher, which turns organic waste into biogas and fertilizers, and

Canada also has a solid track record of creating winning partnerships to build on. MaRS IAF, which started as an experiment in combining government seed funding with a management team of venture capitalists, has become one of Canada’s most active seedstage investment funds. Since 2008, it has supported 175 ventures, leading to $1.7 billion in follow-on funding and more than 5,500 new jobs. MaRS IAF combines a government mandate with a private-sector mindset and is housed in a non-profit organization. That unique perspective has helped it nurture such standout companies as Mindbridge, ACTO, and Nicoya. Based on that success, this January it spun out Graphite Ventures, a new $100-million investment fund that will be able to write even bigger cheques to support promising ventures.

One of the unfortunate side effects of tech’s growth in recent years has been a myopic focus on individual founders with big egos — successful and brilliant in their own right, but imperfect when it comes to creating a repeatable playbook. As the innovation economy matures, it’s clear that ecosystems are a far better foundation and catalyst from which to create repeatable success. Building coalitions and forging partnerships may lack the glamour of playing by your own rules, but it is more effective at creating lasting change. Truly impactful innovation is a team sport.

Dr. Guy-Vincent Jourdan Co-Director, uOttawa IBM Cyber Range & Professor, Faculty of Engineering, uOttawa

Dr. Iosif-Viorel (Vio) Onut Co-Director, uOttawa IBM Cyber Range & Senior Manager, IBM

Yung Wu CEO, MaRS Discovery District

The University of Ottawa and IBM have partnered up to launch a Cyber Range.

Tania Amardeil

This article was supported by MaRS Discovery District.

This article was sponsored by the University of Ottawa and IBM Canada.

Bridging the

Gap by Tapping into Canadian Diversity

Alot of ink has been spilled on the fears surrounding the tech skills gap. In reality, however, the talent is there for those who are willing and able to engage it. Make no mistake — this isn’t a skills gap, it’s a talent war. The rich crop of Canadian talent could revolutionize the Canadian tech sector, but only if sourced from the full mosaic of new Canadian capability. And the organizations who win the battle and reap the benefits will be those who understand what drives Canada’s diverse new skillsforce. As Canada’s leading national technology industry association, TECHNATION Canada is working to build the infrastructure that will enable Canada’s tech sector to fully leverage the potential of Canada’s talent pool.

“The importance of diversity is interwoven into everything in the Canadian tech landscape,” says Denise Shortt, TECHNATION’s Senior Vice President of Industry, Membership and Diversity & Inclusion. “It’s been shown very clearly that a more diverse workforce is a more innovative one, a more productive one, and a more economically competitive one. Diversity, thankfully, is a resource in which Canada is very wealthy. The through-line of our programs is ensuring that the tech sector is tapping into that wealth and nurturing its continued growth with an inclusive and equitable business culture.”

Among TECHNATION’s flagship programs is Career Ready, funded by the Government of Canada’s Student Work Placement Program. Career Ready funds student work placements and helps guide young professionals along career pathways into the tech sector, charting a course toward areas of greatest opportunity and mapping out the skills and knowledge that will allow them to thrive. Alongside Career Ready sit programs like TECHNATION’s LaunchPad, which provides training modules to both students and employers to help them prepare for work placements, CareerFinder, which uses AI technology to analyze real-time data and provide guidance on changing workforce needs, and AdaPT, which helps grads from non-tech disciplines upskill and reskill into tech opportunities.

The success of these thoroughly pragmatic solutions depends, of course, on the engagement from partners within the industry. Partners like Markham-based innovation hub ventureLAB. “We’ve been working with TECHNATION for years, and we have a lot of common goals related to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” says Jane Gertner, Vice President of Partnerships at ventureLAB. “Many of the founders of our companies are from underrepresented groups themselves, and they know how diversity, especially diversity of thought, contributes to growth. We’ve also

taken the opportunity ourselves to bring a significant amount of student and internship talent into our own organization through TECHNATION’s Career Ready Program.”

If you can't find the right talent, you're not looking in the right places

The war for skills in Canada is pitched. There is so much talent, so much knowledge, and so many economic resources on the battlefield. But only through diversity, equity, and inclusion can we bring these forces together into a thriving tech sector in which we are all victorious. “The needle is moving on that, but slowly, and we’re trying to help it move a bit more quickly,” says Justine Kintanar, Vice President of External Relations and Communications at ventureLAB. “It’s important to make sure that we have a tech sector that looks like Canada — that looks like Canadians.”

This goal, which is not just a social imperative, but also an essential ingredient for economic success, is only possible through open collaboration and diligent effort. “Developing a nationwide ecosystem to foster and cultivate the next generation of Canadian talent requires the cooperation of industry, government, academia, and community partners,” says Shortt. “Every partner brings their specific piece of the puzzle. Together we can assemble a bright and colourful image of Canada’s tech future."

Saskatchewan Polytechnic (Sask Polytech) engages in applied research, drawing on faculty expertise to support innovation by employers and providing students the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. The institution’s new Sustainability-Led Integrated Centre of Excellence (SLICE) is an industry-centric, solution-oriented development and deployment centre that’s bringing sustainable development to Saskatchewan and Canada through local technology solutions with global application potential.

Turning waste into something useful “SLICE is a new Sask Polytech applied research centre advancing sustainable resource management with a full life-cycle lens approach,” says Dr. Robin Smith, Academic Chair of Applied Research Operations at SLICE. “Our focus is on key sectors of Saskatchewan’s economy including energy resources, manufacturing, agriculture, and forestry. SLICE is really about delivering solutions to applied research partners in support of a circular, bio-based economy.”

The circular economy prioritizes reusing, recycling, and upcycling of materials and resources to minimize waste and promote sustainability, and two of SLICE’s recent projects highlight innovations in the field.

The ecological soil reclamation project

was undertaken after Sask Polytech was approached by Andrew Carpenter, a freelance Environmental Consultant and President of Reclaimit, a company focused on forest and land restoration.

“I was doing a soil reclamation project up in Northern Saskatchewan and it failed,” says Carpenter. “I realized that I’m not a researcher — I’m a practitioner. I needed some horsepower from the research end.”

Carpenter went looking for support and came upon Sask Polytech. Together, they’ve been exploring how to restore soil using biochar, a charcoal produced by the thermal decomposition of biomass.

“Biochar is made from repurposed waste, so we’re taking a waste product that would end up in a landfill and repurposing it into solid carbon, which is now considered sequestered carbon, so we’re using sequestered carbon to help repair the soil,” says Carpenter. “It’s really cool.”

Supporting a bio-based circular economy

Another exciting project being undertaken by SLICE is the Waste Not, Want Not project, which aims to develop a biocarbon masterbatch, a solid additive used to impart colour and other properties to plastics, that could replace traditional petroleum-based carbon black. This project is with Titan Clean Energy Projects.

“We’re working with Sask Polytech and looking at how we can use materials that might be considered waste from another segment of the economy to improve processes and cycle back into the system,” says Jamie Bakos, President and CEO of Titan. “In this case, we’re looking at developing a product that could assist in making compostable bioplastics. We have the potential to export this material worldwide.”

SLICE’s collaborative, integrated, transdisciplinary approach is focused on understanding the relationships required to address complex issues related to sustainability. “Our partners have access to exceptional facilities, faculty expertise, and an amazing pool of student talent,” says Smith. “One of the benefits of partnering with SLICE is that it’s a single-entry point to multiple areas of expertise at Sask Polytech. Sustainability issues are complex and we recognize that through our collaborative approach.”

The first step to learning what Sask Polytech and its applied research team of expert faculty can do for your business is reach out. “All it takes is a phone call or an email to get started,” says Dr. Susan Blum, associate Vice-President, Applied Research and Innovation. “We’ll work with you — whether you’re just starting out or in a large organization — to determine what you need to accomplish and how we can help you get there."

We can't get there without a plan

Dr. Robin Smith Academic Chair, SLICE School of Natural Resources & Built Environment and School of Mining, Energy, & Manufacturing

Andrew Carpenter Freelance Environmental Consultant & President, Reclaimit

Jane Gertner VP, Partnerships, ventureLAB

Denise Shortt Senior VicePresident of Industry, Membership and Diversity & Inclusion, TECHNATION

Jamie Bakos President & CEO, Titan

Justine Kintanar VP, External Relations, Marketing & Communications, ventureLAB

Tania Amardeil Visit saskpolytech.ca/ slice to learn more about SLICE.

Learn more about Career Ready and other TECHNATION programs benefiting both employers and workers at technation canada.ca This article was sponsored by Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

This article was sponsored by TECHNATION.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SASKATCHEWAN POLYTECHNIC

Mitacs Supporting Partnerships to Fast Track Canadian Innovations

Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. The need to protect people from COVID-19 inspired researcher’s innovation in face mask coatings.

In March 2020, Dr. Seyyedarash (Arash) Haddadi was pursuing postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia (UBC)’s Okanagan Campus on anticorrosion coatings for metallic parts. Then the pandemic hit — prompting him to shift his thinking. “I wanted to help in the fight against COVID-19 and do something to help keep people safe,” says Dr. Haddadi.

So, he redirected his initial graphene research from metals to fabrics — devising an antiviral coating for face masks from a graphene oxide-silver combination. "I wrote a proposal for a project on the application of coatings to different materials and after getting approval, I moved to Ontario to work on the project with a company called Zentek,” says Dr. Haddadi.

Funding under Mitacs Elevate program enabled innovation

Dr. Haddadi received funding for this project under Mitacs’ two-year Elevate program, which he learned about from his supervisor at UBC. Mitacs is a Canadian non-profit research organization that partners with industry, academia, and government to provide research and training programs related to industrial and social innovation.

The Elevate program includes a management training program and a postdoctoral fellowship. “UBC remained my academic partner and Zentek became my industry partner,” says Dr. Haddadi.

The result of nearly one and a half years of exploration, trial, and error was a face mask coating that is low cost to make and more than 99.9 percent effective against the transmission of both person-to-person airborne pathogens and surface pathogens of the COVID-19 virus.

Mitacs helped me commercialize my research in two important ways . . . First, as a university graduate from Iran, Mitacs introduced me to research and industry in Canada. And secondly, the stipend Mitacs provided enabled me to focus on my research and discovery.

Mask coating granted Health Canada approval

In September of 2021, the first mask using this coating received approval from Health Canada, and Zentek (formerly ZEN Graphene Solutions) subsequently made its first commercial sale, marketed as ZenGuardTM to TreboRX Corp., an Ontario-based company.

Zentek has also responded to the antici-

pated demand by investing $15 million to scale up production to reach 800 million antimicrobial masks per month. In addition to achieving a robust number of sales of his product in short time, Dr. Haddadi received the prestigious 2021 Mitacs Award for Commercialization, awarded by the National Research Council (NRC).

Dr. Haddadi is grateful to Mitacs for the experience. “Mitacs helped me commercialize my research in two important ways,” says Dr. Haddadi. “First, as a university graduate from Iran, Mitacs introduced me to research and industry in Canada. And secondly, the stipend Mitacs provided enabled me to focus on my research and discovery,” he says.

Additionally, as part of the Elevate management training component, Dr. Haddadi learned valuable business skills such as project management, how to write business proposals, and how to apply for a patent.

We know that partnerships are key to Canada’s innovation success . . . The collaboration between Dr. Haddadi and Zentek which has led to the development and commercialization of a new antiviral coating for face masks is a perfect example of how academic expertise and a willing industry partner — brought together by Mitacs — can work to create innovations that benefit all of us.

Haddadi’s success is an example of how Mitacs’ academic and industry partnerships empower Canadian innovation. Founded in 1999 with an original focus on applied and industrial mathematics, Mitacs today supports a wide range of disciplines, from STEM to social innovation, working with college and undergraduate students, as well as new graduates and postdocs like Dr. Haddadi.

“We know that partnerships are key to Canada’s innovation success,” says John Hepburn, CEO of Mitacs. “The collaboration between Dr. Haddadi and Zentek which has led to the development and commercialization of a new antiviral coating for face masks is a perfect example of how academic expertise and a willing industry partner — brought together by Mitacs — can work to create innovations that benefit all of us,” he says.

For his part, Dr. Haddadi is hoping to apply his existing innovation to solving other problems. “We are still working to optimize this coating and test it in other applications, he says.

By building a world-class, diverse community of innovators through its collaborative model, attracting and deploying top talent to industry, and matching need with expertise, Mitacs is helping to create ambitious solutions to real world challenges.

Visit mitacs.ca/en/ programs to learn more about Mitacs programs.

This article was sponsored by Mitacs.

Dr. Seyyedarash (Arash) Haddadi Polymer Engineering, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus

The Power of Innovative Partnerships: When One Plus One Equals Three

The best partnerships are ones where each partner amplifies the strengths of the other, bringing out the best in each other and adding up to more than the sum of their parts. That’s certainly the case with the Ericsson-Carleton University Partnership for Research and Leadership in Wireless Networks, which has been going strong for two years now, with exciting results. The innovative collaboration shows the amazing things that can happen when industry and academia work together.

The benefits of collaboration

The Ericsson-Carleton University Partnership for Research and Leadership in Wireless Networks is a collaborative effort to drive innovation, train skilled workers, and build more reliable, secure technology for the future of 5G wireless communications.

“Ericsson Ottawa is a strategic research and development site for Ericsson in North America. We are the largest Ericsson 5G R&D centre in North America,” says John Luszczek, Business Opportunities Leader at Ericsson Ottawa. “Carleton University has an excellent

academic program, including engineering and computer sciences, and is known as a leader in research. With our collaboration, we’re delivering hands-on experiential learning to help build student skills so they’re ready to meet industry needs as well as defining industry challenges so we can solve them through academic research. This is a perfect equation of having a ‘one plus one equals three’ collaboration, where we’re really seeing benefits that singularly wouldn’t have as much impact as the addition of the two.”

Focusing on talent development and research

The strategic collaboration consists of research projects, the Ericsson Fellowship program, the 5G Wireless Laboratory, the development of a 5G Networks course, and the Ericsson Research Chair.

John Lambadaris is the Chancellor’s Professor and Ericsson Chair in 5G Wireless Research at Carleton University. He has been active in the field for over 25 years and has collaborated extensively with the high-tech industry. “My area of research is performance analysis of data and communication

networks,” he says. “My research started in areas like network traffic modelling and performance analysis of architecture for next-generation internet. These days I’m working in cloud computing, network visualization, big data, and 5G wireless networks.”

Lambadaris has collaborated with the team at Ericsson Ottawa for a decade, and is excited about their fruitful partnership. He notes that the partnership’s primary goals are advanced research and training highly-qualified personnel. “We introduced the Fellowship program for that second reason,” he says. “It’s an innovative step that aims to attract top-notch students. The idea is to find the best of the best both nationally and internationally, and to attract them here and bring them into close contact and collaboration with Ericsson.”

“This partnership is impacting society overall because we’re really looking at driving innovation in Canada,” says Luszczek. “We’re building a skilled workforce through our academic programs and research, and at the end of this we’ll be able to take advantage of this technology we’ve developed for the future in mobile communication solutions."

Image owned by Ericsson

Ioannis (John) Lambadaris Chancellor's Professor & Ericsson Chair in 5G Wireless Research, Carleton University

John Luszczek Business Opportunities Leader, Ericsson Ottawa

The Ericsson-Carleton University Strategic Partnership for Research, Talent Development, and Leadership in Wireless Networks is a strategic collaboration amplifying the strengths of industry and academia.

Tania Amardeil

Visit carleton.ca/ ericsson To learn more.

This article was sponsored by Carleton University.