Lab2Market pilot project teaches university researchers to think like entrepreneurs

Ryerson, Dalhousie and Memorial universities are teaming up to deliver a two-year pilot project to help move publicly funded research out of the lab and into the marketplace. Called Lab2Market, the project aims to develop a national commercialization program for intellectual property created at Canadian post-secondary institutions and boost innovation competitiveness. Canada invests heavily in higher-ed research and private sector R&D but still ranks only 17th on the Global Innovation Index, and has fallen behind most other OECD countries in productivity.

Lab2Market's unique focus on research commercialization and, in particular, on qualitative research are what set it apart from other university-based entrepreneurship programs. The project is backed by more than $2.6 million from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) and Mitacs. Over the next 2 years, it will put more than 80 teams from Southern Ontario and Atlantic Canada through an intensive entrepreneurship training program focused on helping researchers evaluate the commercial potential of their technologies.

“Lab2Market tries to get participants to shift their focus to looking at how a customer understands their problem, and then to take that information back to the lab where it can inform how they would develop their product,” said John MacRitchie, assistant vice-president, Zone Learning and Strategic Initiatives at Ryerson University, in an interview with RE$EARCH MONEY. "Our hope is that Lab2Market can bring these teams into the larger entrepreneurial ecosystem that is available to them and help them tap into it more effectively."

Adapting global best practices

Lab2Market is modelled on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) and Innovate UK’s ICURe (Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research) programs, launched in 2011 and 2014, respectively. Since that time, I-Corps has trained over 1,450 teams from 230 universities, and I-Corps teams have created more than 600 start-up companies, which have attracted over $200 million in funding. Many of the teams subsequently entered the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, a federally funded R&D program for small businesses in the U.S. Inspired by its success, numerous other departments and government agencies have adopted the program, including the National Institutes of Health.

Lab2Market's first cohort will be led by VentureWell, the nonprofit that facilitates I-Corps and many other initiatives for faculty and student innovators. Applications are being accepted until mid-February, and the program will kick off at Ryerson in May. The teams will consist of an entrepreneurial lead who is a full-time graduate student or post-doctoral fellow, a technical lead who is the principal investigator on the research project, and a business mentor. The entrepreneurial leads will complete a four-month program, during which time they will conduct up to 100 interviews with potential customers, partners and competitors, testing their assumptions about the market for their innovations.

“I've worked in a few incubators and a lot of the teams that we deal with don't have the technical backgrounds to develop their product or service. Whereas Lab2Market is researchers who've developed phenomenal tech and just have to shift their focus and validate that this is a problem, or not, from the perspective of the customer. If they are able to do that effectively, they can move really fast,” said Wesley Kosiba, Lab2Market’s program coordinator at Ryerson.

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