Nurturing the entrepreneurial mind-set

Perhaps the most dramatic feature of the Covid-19 pandemic was its demonstration of how a public health emergency activated entrepreneurial instincts in all quarters of the country. Besides the creative diversion of manufacturing resources to produce personal protective equipment or hand sanitizer, members of the research community laid the foundation of new biomolecular techniques for tackling not just this viral outbreak, but all sorts of disease vectors we might face in the future.

For her part, Elicia Maine likes to point to progress in lipid chemistry, particularly new developments in nanoparticle drug delivery led by University of British Columbia biochemistry professor Pieter Cullis, who more than a decade earlier had co-founded the Vancouver-based firm Acuitas to bring just this kind of innovation to market.

On the eve of Canada Day, Maine, who is the Van Dusen Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at nearby Simon Fraser University (SFU), highlighted the need for Canada to begin systematically cultivating individuals like Cullis. And her interest in the subject is far more than academic. Starting on July 1, Maine took on a newly created position as Associate Vice President of Knowledge Mobilization & Innovation at Simon Fraser University. In that capacity she is tasked with helping administrators introduce students, staff and faculty from every level and all academic disciplines to the concepts of innovation, as well as providing them with resources to apply those concepts to building commercial ventures.

SFU has a serious stake in this initiative, having recently topped a global ranking of universities with “entrepreneurial spirit”. That phrase may smack of bureaucratic rhetoric, but Maine embraces it in concrete terms. She points to campus programs that allow students to achieve unprecedented mobility across institutional disciplines and escape the limitations imposed by counting research papers or attending lectures.

“We have built something that cuts across all eight faculties in our university,” she says, referring to the Chang Certificate in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, a certificate program open to students from second-year and up. “But even more important, our main objective is creating entrepreneurial mind-set.”

Maine has had an even more direct hand in helping students establish this outlook. She was the founding Academic Director of the Invention to Innovation (i2I) program, which SFU’s Beedie School of Business launched in 2015 and expanded to other universities three years ago in collaboration with the national research body Mitacs. This seven-month program sets students on one of three innovation paths, none of which might have been otherwise accessible or even apparent to them:

• Starting a science-based venture, if not as CEO at least as a key force within the organization
• Championing innovation and new product development within an existing company
• Conducting scientific research with the goal of framing its implications for potential commercial opportunities.

Part of the curriculum deals with getting students to think practically about how to navigate the notorious “valley of death” that challenges ideas attempting to navigate from a laboratory bench to the competitive marketplace. “It’s essentially how do you shape science innovation, how do you think about the attributes that you’re trying to create, how do you think about market prioritization and user needs, how do you think about your key uncertainties and ways you’re going to mitigate them, how do you think about your IP strategy, and lastly what’s your value proposition,” she says. This talent development and shaping of science innovation has the potential to mobilize breakthrough research and better utilize Canadian researchers.

Maine describes this as the first stage of a “build-for-scale” approach to science innovation, which looks beyond the more simplistic aspects of commercialization to consider all of the necessary aspects of creating a science-based venture. She cites Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Cyclotron Road initiative as an outstanding example of enabling scientist entrepreneurs. Highlighted by a fellowship that supports entrepreneurial scientists and engineers, since it was introduced in 2015, this program has been integral in commercializing breakthrough research, has raised more than $300 million in follow-on funding and brought in hundreds of new employees to work on various projects.

Similar results can be realized here, she insists, especially since the students themselves are the ones most eager to move in this direction. More than 80 per cent of STEM PhD students do not go into traditional, tenure-track faculty positions, even though that is what most curricula prepare them for. If nothing changes, she warns, we risk losing all of this talent and its potential contribution to Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

“I firmly believe, from my research and from my teaching, that STEM graduate students and post-docs in Canada are a hugely under-utilized resource,” concludes Maine. “To do right by them, and to strengthen our innovation track record, they’re the key to that shift.”

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