BHER Roundtable concludes national innovation challenge to boost COVID-19 recovery

The Business and Higher Education Roundtable has wrapped up its first Canada Comeback Challenge, a national challenge meant to shore up entrepreneurial opportunities for students and support economic recovery after the pandemic.

The challenge paired teams of students with private businesses, public institutions and nonprofit organizations to address real-world problems both related and unrelated to COVID-19.  The organizations — ranging from Genome Canada to Restaurants Canada to the Canadian Council for the Arts — provided challenge prompts while the students submitted proposals for potential solutions.

A total of 47 teams worked on projects for the challenge this winter, which were winnowed down to the top 10 teams on March 22. After a public vote to select the top three, a panel of judges decided the final winner on March 31.

The winning project, The Mining Network, was created by a team of students from the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. Colleen Jackson, Ryynn Rathwell, and Natasha Werbicki proposed a platform that allows users to see whether mines are meeting industry standards on pollution.

"Hearing our name was pretty surreal," Rathwell said, who is in Haskayne’s Master of Management program along with her teammates. ‘We were pretty much in disbelief. There was no expectation that we were going to win.”

The Mining Network's solution was based on a private sector challenge from the Mining Industry Human Resources Council to “portray mining as a career option in the green economy."

The winning team will receive seed funding and will be partnered with the industry partner — in their case, the Mining Industry Human Resources Council — to develop the project further, according to Matthew McKean, BHER’s chief R&D officer.

McKean said the program is part of the organization’s COVID-19 response after many students had their work placements and internships cancelled or delayed in 2020. “Ninety per cent of students were reporting market disruption,” he told Research Money in an interview.

The challenge is part of a $9-billion federal support package for students announced by the federal government in April 2020. The package included funding for The Business and Higher Education Roundtable alongside Mitacs, the Digital Skills for Youth Program, and Computers for Schools Plus.

Teams allowed broad latitude to solve real-world problems

Participating organizations provided students with a challenge, but did not specify what form the solution had to take. The open format allowed students to take different approaches depending on their skills and academic background.

“There were a lot of apps, as you can imagine, and other technology-based solutions,” McKean said. But teams also produced solutions like software for the tourism industry and work-from-home policy programs.

Rathwell, Jackson and Werbicki of The Mining Network told Research Money that their project began as an advertising campaign to attract prospective employees to work in the mining industry, but they changed their focus to address the broader issue of corporate governance and transparency in mining.

“The more we talked to people, whether they were stakeholders, people from our university or members of the public, the more we started to realize that the public’s perception of mining is not reflected in what miners are actually doing,” said Rathwell, adding that many mining companies are taking steps towards more efficient and sustainable approaches.

By making data available from the National Pollutant Release Inventory along with data on environmental, social and corporate governance, the team hopes their project will better inform potential employees as well as mining companies, governments, investors, and residents living near mines.

“We saw it as something so much bigger than what the challenge was asking us to do,” said Colleen Jackson, another member of the team.

Projects included policy proposals and wayfinder apps

Other teams took similarly creative approaches to challenges.

One group of students that made it to the top 10 teams proposed a mobile application to help visually-impaired visitors navigate Canadian airports. Their project, which is called A-Eye, was based on a challenge from the CNIB Foundation (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind) to improve wayfinding navigation given that touching surfaces can spread of COVID-19.

“There’s a whole market for accessibility apps out there,” Mohamed Allalou, a member of the team and computer engineering student at Concordia University, told Research Money. Their idea is to partner with institutions, such as Toronto Pearson International Airport, who have their own mobile applications and provide them with an algorithm for wayfinding.

If it got off the ground, an application using their system would re-colour footage for people with forms of color blindness as well as translate physical signs into text and “read” the text to a user with a verbal prompt.

“The value we bring is our algorithm, to be able to receive a picture as an input, run it through the algorithm, and receive an output in natural language,” said Allalou. He added that the team hopes to launch their own business in the coming months.

Another top 10 team from Western University, meanwhile, designed a policy program to encourage better remote working practices in private businesses. Their project addressed a challenge from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) on innovation and adaptation to COVID-19 in the workplace.

Virginia Ling, a member of the team and Bachelor of Commerce student at Western’s Ivey Business School, said they discovered that women’s employment had dropped to a 30-year low during the pandemic and decided to focus on remote working solutions for women. “We wanted to focus on targeting the employers and giving them the resources to change their mind on how flexibility works,” she said.

The policy program the students designed would incentivize businesses to evaluate their own work-from-home policies with a grant or a tax break if they successfully completed a flexible work program.

“We learned a lot about what it takes to create a feasible idea,” Ling said. “You have to make sure the logic of your idea makes sense, that the implementation steps make sense and that you’re tackling the problem that you set out to do.”

Challenge designed to create work-integrated learning experiences

The Canada Comeback Challenge is designed to be a work-integrated learning (WIL) experience for students. Work-integrated learning can be as structured as a work placement or an internship, but short-term challenges are another way for students to gain experience, according to McKean.

A large number of students submitted business plans in the fall, which were winnowed down to the 47 teams that continued into the winter. Students received mentoring resources, feedback on  proposals and reimbursement for expenses, including $4,000 to produce a video pitch in one round.

For the BHER, the challenge wasn't about the winner, but about ensuring that students emerge with industry-relevant skills during a period when many opportunities disappeared. If any of the students' projects become viable businesses or products, that would be "icing on the cake," McKean said.

"I admire their ambition, and if they can make it work and if we can help or the employer associates can help, that's amazing," he said. "But for us, this is contributing to a larger, federally-mandated goal to provide every student with a work-integrated learning opportunity. It's that experience and the skills that we're after."

McKean added that the BHER plans to continue the challenge in the future. "The future of the program is to have relationships with professors across Canada where we can provide this program as a plug-and-play, micro-WIL opportunity for college, university and polytechnic profs.”

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