Canada’s Most Innovative Partnerships
Collaborative R&D Keeps Companies
Globally Competitive
The Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation (SONAMI) helps Canadian manufacturing companies take R&D to the next level. Elina Ojanen
In a global economy, the manufacturing industry has become fiercely competitive. To maintain competitiveness, companies are reaching out to the Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation (SONAMI) to collaborate with post-secondary institutions on applied research projects. The network provides companies access to federally matched funding, expertise, researchers and students, and cutting-edge resources.
What is SONAMI?
The institutions in this Niagara College-led network work through their respective research centres to collaborate with smalland medium-sized companies, tackling their manufacturing-related changes. Having access to this diverse network makes it possible for companies to find the right match to meet their unique challenges. Leveraging the capabilities of members, SONAMI provides innovative solutions, such as process optimization, designing
and testing prototypes, evaluating new technologies, and developing and commercializing new or improved products — all at the speed of business.
The benefits of collaboration
“What was really impressive was the speed from the point that the project was discussed to the moment it was initiated,” notes Michael McHale, Chief Financial Officer of EatSleepRIDE Mobile Inc., whose company’s project was started within three weeks of acceptance. Since its inception in 2016, the award-winning network has received $23.3 million in federal investment to support industry through applied research projects. To date, roughly 400 projects have been successfully completed, resulting in $12 million in sales from commercialized innovations and the creation of over 100 new jobs.
What was really impressive was the speed, from the point that the project was discussed to the moment it was initiated.
Michael McHale CFO, EatSleepRIDE Mobile Inc.
Partnership Helping to Send Innovative Women Entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley
Building an international network is challenging for a busy female startup enterprise, but innovative partnerships can help ease the way.
Anne Papmehl
Women tech entrepreneurs are significant contributors to Canada’s innovation ecosystem. But to grow locally and scale globally, they need connections to international influencers, investors, and incubators.
A recent partnership between Mitacs and the Canadian Women’s Network (CWN) is allowing Canadian female tech founders to do just that, early on in their entrepreneurial journey.
Mitacs is a Canadian non-profit research organization that partners with industry, academia, and government to provide funding and resources to support Canada’s knowledge economy. The CWN is a community of 700 members across Canada whose goal is to support women founders by giving them access to its network of global investors, mentors, and executives.
Enabling women to network
The evidence of the benefits women bring into the economy are clear, organizations with greater numbers of female talent in Executive and Board positions show materially improved performance and impact. Yet, still today, we see too few women in leadership positions. This is why the partnership between Mitacs and the Canadian Women's Network is particularly exciting.
Through this collaboration, a group of outstanding Canadian women, at the forefront of innovation and entrepreneurship, get to participate in the Pathways to Silicon Valley program, supporting them into spaces where they belong, can learn and make a greater impact.
“At Mitacs, we recognize that talent, and more specifically female talent, is critical to the success of Canada’s innovation system,” says Tash Ismail, Chief of Business Development at Mitacs. “Through our programming, we’re able to create meaningful connections and to foster the new partnerships necessary to drive economic growth and improve quality of life for all Canadians.”
Through support from Mitacs, 16 Canadian female founders were able to travel to San Francisco to participate in the CWN signature program, Pathway to Silicon Valley.
“We’re thrilled to partner with the CWN and to help make it possible for this group of outstanding Canadian women, who are at the forefront of innovation and entrepreneurship, to participate in the Pathway to Silicon Valley program,” says Ismail.
Success drives demand
The partnership with Mitacs allowed CWN to scale and expand the program, adding more participants to this year’s event. In addition to networking events, panels, workshops, and executive coaching, founders pitched and received feedback from CWN’s investor network.
"We’ve all heard that your network is your net worth, and that couldn’t be truer for founders looking to raise capital,” says Joanne Fedeyko, CWN Founder and CEO. “It’s critically important for founders to start building a network before they need it, and the CWN’s Pathway to Silicon Valley program enables women founders to make over 100 industry connections with investors, executives, and successful founders in order to build a high-value network and scale into a world-class business.”
Loreen Wales Founder, My Viva
Can you tell us about your business?
My Viva is a digital health company that drives efficiency in the clinic setting through the creation of automated lifestyle care plans for chronic disease management and that supports patients at home to take control of their health.
As a woman entrepreneur, what challenges have you faced growing your business? How has support from Mitacs helped to address these challenges?
Digital health is a challenging sector in Canada with very long sales cycles (two to four years) and a longstanding lack of support for Canadian entrepreneurs, which I’m really hoping is changing because we have so much amazing talent in this country. Having Mitacs’s support to attend the Pathway to Silicon Valley program was a huge help to introduce me to an ecosystem in the U.S. as we roll out our U.S. strategy.
What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Seek out an accelerator program early on, as you’ll meet other entrepreneurs going through the same things as you are. It will help you build your support network, and you’ll be able to accelerate your learnings through one another.
Azadeh Mostaghel
Founder, ORCHID Analytics
Can you tell us about your business?
ORCHID Analytics is a health care technology company providing AI-driven analytics to solve the health care industry’s biggest management challenges. Our predictive analytics software helps hospitals and clinics optimize capacity management, scheduling, patient flow, staffing, and resource allocation.
As a woman entrepreneur, what challenges have you faced growing your business? How has support from Mitacs helped to address these challenges?
Access to capital and market entry have been the most challenging aspects. There have been incidents where we were engaged for our services for no pay and others that haven’t paid to date. It’s been disheartening to deal with large health care organizations, in a contractual and financial sense. Taking part in Pathway to Silicon Valley with the support of Mitacs and the MEI program has allowed us to begin our fundraising journey and to create a concrete path to get access to capital.
What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Get as much advice as you can, synthesize it, and take note but discard any pieces of advice that aren’t applicable in terms of getting you to where you want to go. And never forget your vision and the reason you wake up every day.
Tash Ismail Chief of Business Development, Mitacs
Joanne Fedeyko Founder & CEO, CWN
Innovative Canadian Research Is Redefining the Future of the Oceans
Generations of Nova Scotians have made understanding the ocean their life’s work. Today, the high-tech scientific evolution of that work is reshaping our climate future.
D.F. McCourt
On Dartmouth Cove, just across the water from the historic piers of Halifax, a pair of unassuming buildings house an ongoing revolution in ocean technology. This is where you’ll find Nova Scotia Community College’s research and innovation centre—SEATAC, and it’s pushing ever forward our understanding of the oceans that cover nearly 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface. In an era of climate crisis, where the oceans play an integral role, the innovation happening here informs our strategies for climate change prevention, mitigation, and resilience.
As Canada takes on a global leadership role in climate science, the generational ocean wisdom of the Maritimes is central to our ascendance. And Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) is where that wisdom gathers and multiplies. “Nova Scotia is known as Canada’s Ocean Playground because of our close relationship with the sea,” says NSCC President Don Bureaux. “As we face this critical turning point for climate change, NSCC has an important role to play. By supporting ocean tech innovators focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping the ocean clean, we can help ensure Nova Scotians can respectfully live, work, and play by the ocean for generations to come.”
The ocean innovation at NSCC is driven by a diverse array of research projects and collaborations, both at SEATAC and in other initiatives like the Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG), which has
been studying flood risk, coastal erosion, and ocean pollution for over two decades. One coastal mapping project out of the AGRG, led by research scientist and AGRG leader Timothy Webster, was recognized with the inaugural Public Impact Award at the 2022 Discovery Awards for its quantifiable and immediate benefit to the people of Nova Scotia.
The gaps in our maps
Nova Scotia is known as Canada’s Ocean Playground because of our close relationship with the sea.
“The coastal zone is a challenging place to map because techniques that work on the land for mapping typically don't work through the water, and technologies for mapping in the deep ocean become expensive and dangerous in shallow areas,” explains Webster. “The result is something called the white ribbon, where you have decent maps in deeper water and detailed maps of the land, but then, in the coastal areas, there’s this gap.”
In the domain of flood-risk prediction and climate projection especially, the white ribbon presents a growing problem. Webster’s team has a unique high-tech solution. “We use a special system called a topo-bathymetric LiDAR that has a near-infrared laser that’s good for mapping both land and water,” says Webster. “It has a green laser that will actually see through
the water, map the seabed, come back up, and tell us the depth. This has allowed us to do flood-risk mapping that’s very precise.”
A new era of ocean innovation
The practical success of projects like this, combined with a renewed interest in ocean tech from both the public and private sectors, has prompted a renaissance at NSCC, one which it’s growing to accommodate with a new campus currently under construction on Cape Breton Island. “The Sydney Waterfront Campus is scheduled to open in 2024 and will offer new marine-focused programming for students looking to build careers in the ocean economy,” says Bureaux. “The 305,000-square-foot campus is on track to be 100 per cent heated and cooled through geothermal heating by drawing water from Sydney Harbour. What’s more, it’s being built to withstand forecasted sea level rise for the next century.”
Canada’s relationship with the ocean may be undergoing a sea change, but one thing is certain: the next generation of skilled professionals educated in Nova Scotia will be as intimately tied to the water as were their forebears. And, given the unprecedented growth of the ocean technology sector, there will be no shortage of opportunities for them to practise those skills for the betterment of all.
INNOVATION PROTECTS OUR OCEANS.
Innovate with us to keep our oceans clean and to mitigate the risks of climate change on coastal regions, so we can live, work and play by the sea for generations to come.
Canada's New Plant-Based Food Innovators Are Doing Big Things
Looking for benefits for everything from the environment to their own health, consumers want a variety of choices at the grocery store, and the Canadian plant-based food sector is finding new ways to provide them.
D.F. McCourt
The fundamentals for plant-based foods in Canada are incredibly strong. We have a populace that’s health-conscious, environmentally motivated, and plugged in to issues of animal welfare. We have a broad and diverse agricultural base that can support robust ingredient production and processing. And we have the economic sophistication for an end-to-end supply chain entirely within our own borders.
Still, although things like climate change, economic growth, and public health are strong motivators, the biggest drivers of Canadians’ food choices remain taste, price, and convenience. These are exactly the areas where Protein Industries Canada CEO Bill Greuel sees innovation poised to make the largest gains.
The power of collaboration
“There’s a lot of room for innovation in terms of processing and scaling of ingredient manufacturing while continuing to produce products that consumers want,” says Greuel. “We're using a collaborative innovation project as the gateway to improving supply chain resiliency and domestication of the supply chain in Canada. When collaboration like this happens, all of the value of these foods stays in Canada and gets magnified along the value chain, creating accessibility for consumers based on price and volume.”
As the not-for-profit tasked with administering the plant-based protein innovation cluster, Protein Industries Canada plays a vital role in facilitating the growth of this market segment, both helping new companies get off the ground and providing support and resources to the entities that have been thriving in the space for decades.
Fava, a woman-owned ingredient company and farm in Manitoba that is now our main supplier of fava beans,” says Byrne. “We feel a sense of pride in the community and we attribute a lot of our success to the partnerships and relationships we’ve made with other organizations who share the same goals and mission as we do.”
Harnessing generational agricultural wisdom
Prairie Fava can trace its origins back through five generations of farmers in Manitoba, but the com pany itself is also part of the newer cohort of innovation-focused Canadian enterprises born from renewed interest in the environmental, health, and economic benefits of plant-based foods. Founded in 2015, Prairie Fava is now the Canadian industry expert in growing, processing, and packaging the highest-quality fava products for the plant-based market.
We're using a collaborative innovation project as the gateway to improving supply chain resiliency and domestication of the supply chain in Canada.
No newcomer to plant-based foods
In Vancouver, all the way back in the 1980s, Kimberly Chamberland was wowing customers at Kimberly’s Kafe with the first veggie burger in the Pacific Northwest. Today, her daughter Jasmine Byrne is President of Big Mountain Foods, one of Canada’s leading suppliers of retail plant-based alternative foods.
“Big Mountain Foods, while remaining true to its mission and principles, has continued to innovate continuously over the years,” says Byrne. “We’ve always been known to create culinary experiences through the many diverse plant-based ingredients we use, and research plays a huge role in that.”
Even for established players like Big Mountain Foods, the advent of the plant-based protein innovation cluster represented a significant boon. A growing industry like this one is not somewhere you want to go it alone. “Protein Industries Canada introduced us to Prairie
“The world is seeking new plant protein-based foods to feed a growing popu lation, address growing climate challenges, and meet consumer demands for highly nutritious products,” says Prairie Fava co-founder Hailey Jefferies.
“Research has underpinned our success, from producing newer, better beans for farmers to manufacturing new ingredients for the food industry to developing new technologies for consumer products.”
For younger companies like Prairie Fava especially, access to funding and collaborative partnerships is essential to growing their operations to their full potential. “Being innovative is expensive and developing products and applications for a new ingredient presents challenges,” says Jefferies. “Being a member of Protein Industries Canada has provided us with strong support from other industry partners, research organizations, associations, government, and funding agencies.”
Impressive growth and widespread benefits
When plant-based food companies flourish, whether they’re newly founded or long-established, Canada wins. Greuel currently estimates that the plant-based food and ingredient sector in Canada has the potential to grow to a $25-billion opportunity by 2035. Avenues for economic growth on this scale are hard to come by, and it’s especially rare for these opportunities to be paired with such inarguable social and environmental benefits for the country and the world.
Undoubtedly, some of the most profound innovations in the plant-based foods space will come from companies that have not yet made their debut. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that Protein Industries Canada, and collaborators like Big Mountain Foods and Prairie Fava, will be ready to welcome these innovators with open arms. This is a market with a lot of room for new players.
Bill Greuel CEO, Protein Industries Canada
Jasmine Byrne President, Big Mountain Foods
Hailey Jefferies Co-Founder, Prairie Fava
A New Series Aims to Empower Young Indigenous Entrepreneurs
The Ohpikiwin Series: Journey to financial empowerment — delivered in partnership by Futurpreneur, Youth Business International, and Accenture — empowers young Indigenous entrepreneurs.
Futurpreneur has been fuelling the entrepreneurial passions of Canada’s young enterprise for two decades. “We’re the only national non-profit that provides financing, mentoring, and support tools to aspiring young entrepreneurs nationwide aged 18 to 39,” says Holly Atjecoutay, a First Nations woman and Director of Futurpreneur’s Indigenous Entrepreneur Startup Program (IESP). With up to $60,000 in financing, an expert hand-matched mentor for up to two years, and access to resources, Futurpreneur’s internationally recognized IESP helps young entrepreneurs bring their business plans to life.
Supporting Indigenous youth Now, Futurpreneur has partnered with Youth Business International (YBI) and Accenture to launch a new informative series dedicated to the financial empowerment of young Indigenous entrepreneurs. The Ohpikiwin Series: Journey to financial empowerment is delivered as part of its IESP and focuses specifically on Indigenous economic inclusion and resilience to assist young Indigenous aspiring entrepreneurs in developing their business financial capacity and entrepreneurship skills.
Importantly, all workshops are delivered with Indigenous values in mind. “The fourpart workshop series focuses on reframing the concepts of credit, financing, budgeting, and goals,” says Atjecoutay. “We’re looking at it from a re-approach of Indigenous knowledge, worldview, teachings, storytelling,
and value systems as a foundation point, and link ing those concepts and teachings that are so intrinsic to our identities and commun ities to the westernized systems of credit, financing, and money in general. Our main goal of this partnership is to partake in the shift of understanding that Indigenous prosperity has always been present in Indigenous economies, and that we’re driving toward Indigenous economic resilience through financial resilience.”
The power of partnership
Thanks to the support and collaboration of the three partners, The Ohpikiwin Series has been able to amplify its reach and impact, contributing to the growth of Indigenous economic prosperity through entrepreneurship in Canada.
We’re looking at it from a re-approach of Indigenous knowledge, worldview, teachings, storytelling, and value systems as a foundation point.
“Inclusive entrepreneurship is at the forefront of YBI’s mission,” says Anita Tiessen, CEO of YBI. “We’re extremely proud of our first
program — The Ohpikiwin Series, Journey to financial empowerment — specifically targeted at supporting young Indigenous entrepreneurs. We’re working closely with our member Futurpreneur and our long-standing partner Accenture on this important program as part of Accenture’s investment in a more equitable future through its Skills to Succeed initiative. We’ll share learnings to drive cross-cutting benefits to our wider network, to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to improve outcomes for Indigenous entrepreneurs.”
OCI Partnership Helping to Accelerate Equity in the Auto Sector
The partnership between Accelerate Auto and Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN) is accelerating opportunities for diverse talent in the automotive industry.
In Ontario’s automotive and mobility sector, 27 per cent of the sector’s workforce is comprised of visible minorities, with only 4 per cent of the total workforce being Black. Accelerate Auto, a not-for-profit coalition of Black professionals wants that to change.
Their mission is to advance career opportunities for Black people in the auto industry while tackling the systemic racism that is hampering progress. Their work involves actively promoting the automotive and mobility industry to Black talent in high schools and post-secondary schools, col-
laborating with educational institutions, connecting students to scholarships and mentorship opportunities, advocating for greater equity in the sector to industry groups and employers and more.
As their name suggests — Accelerate Auto is calling for action to happen faster. Not in a decade. Not next year. Now.
The Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN), the flagship initiative from the government of Ontario, led by the Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) agrees — and has partnered with Accelerate Auto on direct engagement events to increase
younger student awareness and ramp up opportunities for the next generation of diverse talent.
“It’s vital for the workforce of the future to see themselves in those that currently occupy the auto industry, so they know that it is a viable career aspiration,” says Shannon Miller, Strategic Partnerships Project Lead for OVIN.
Overall, the goal of a more diverse automotive workforce is to be reflective of the customer base it serves. Because to drive home a brighter future for all, everyone needs access to the front seat.
Tania Amardeil
Anita Tiessen CEO, YBI
Holly Atjecoutay Director,