From Science to Entrepreneurship

hello everyone and welcome to this monk innovation policy lab 4.0 session um it's my delight to welcome you here uh part of this panel on science to entrepreneurship and what promises to be a very fruitful discussion my name is sarah lubick i'm sfu's director of entrepreneurship and that means that i'm part of sfu's innovation strategy to unleash the entrepreneurial mindset and create the conditions for impact but i also come about this as a tech and science entrepreneur so i'm even more excited and have spent some time with the federal government around their innovation strategy and we have so many experts here to take these questions from so many different uh angles that i will be brief in my intro so you can get to all of the amazing people that we have with you today the purpose of this panel is to explore the programs and skills required to spark the entrepreneurial mindset and behaviors in scientists and in entrepreneurs and scientists and in tech entrepreneurs so this is a particularly important discussion because for those of us on the academic side a lot of the academic entrepreneurship literature has focused on technology transfer and not necessarily skills and programs and for those of us who are on the program side a lot of our programs have been very much focused towards uh digital tech and the kind of tech that can be addressed with lean startup methods and this leaves significant room for the kind of science and tech that can change the world but often takes quite considerably different pathways and more complex ecosystems so i'm joined today by fabiano armellini who is from the cold polytechnic in montreal sophie vidu at laval alicia maine at simon fraser university and sherry bretznitz from the mock school at u of t so how it's going to work today is that i'm going to ask each of the panelists to give a five six minute intro on how what they're doing at the moment and also how they see science tech entrepreneurship so we can start getting a breadth of all we're looking at um after that we'll be immediately taking q and a's from the audience and i have some questions myself so we will have a very fruitful discussion so without further ado i'd like to ask fabiano to please uh tell us about all that you're doing and how you see science and tech entrepreneurship thank you very much sarah and thanks for the introduction and hello everyone welcome to this webinar uh first of all i'd like to say that i'm an honor to be a part of this panel full of competent women uh i'm the only man around the table here so uh uh please be indulgent with me if i say something that is not up to the level of discussion please uh apologize i'm just a man so uh jokes apart uh i'm gonna talk a little bit about myself and then talk about the topic so fabiano malini i'm associate professor professor of technique montreal for seven years now before that i work in the industry as a private engineer and also as an entrepreneur i have co-founded two companies in brazil where i come from uh when i was the first professor highly polytechnic whose position had the label entrepreneurship on it uh which is quite relevant to the the chat the discussion that i have here now we have that but we have two professors uh but anyway it's it's it's a great challenge uh before writing here i have never done research entrepreneurship my research is more in on innovation product development although i have some research going on on the topic now what i want to share with you is more on this personal experience i've been having in including entrepreneurship in engineering education so uh the the very position uh my position at politics makes the result of a rising awareness of the school which is an engineering school for those who do not know uh that it should be doing something about inter-entrepreneurial education okay yeah so uh it's for the seven years i have been involved in the whole process of developing a program and developing right just rising awareness uh so what we have elaborated a strategic plan we have put we have created a an office for entrepreneurship support which now comes with 10 people working on it uh we have improved our offer of courses uh coaching programs uh for for our entrepreneur students and also for external entrepreneurs who wants to collaborate with us and one of the greatest obstacles that i have personally faced in this process is to find our place in the sun in the local entrepreneurship ecosystem because we have a business school right here around the corner entrepreneurship is normally a subject that is treating this kind of school so the first question then asked internally and externally is okay how do you think distinguish yourself from what it's been done with actually someone old our business school right right here on the corner and uh well it is uh the answer for this question i have been refining over the years uh one thing is clear our vocation is on techno entrepreneurship because we are an engineering school of course but the question is and that's not that's the question is not easy to answer is what is techno entrepreneurship uh well because well conventional entrepreneurship also uh uses technologies nowadays so i cannot say okay it's all in all ventures that use technologies because nowadays from different measures everyone is doing technology or just using technology so that's not what defines the technology technological venture it's not also developing technology or just okay uh speaking of researching spinoffs because for that we have another label scientific entrepreneurship which technical interference is part of but it's not the whole of tech entrepreneurship so what it is uh what i often what i often say is that what makes a new venture a technological startup is the is the fact that you need to develop something new whether it's a new product a new service or a new platform in order to deliver your valuable position to your customer then conventional entrepreneurship that you'll have more or less in a process where you find a need from that you go look for the product that very often already exists you are just customizing perhaps or adapting to your your own needs and then you go design your business model which you will find the best best fit between your offer and uh and your customer integrity apprenticeship to start with it's not always that you start by need in the the case of scientific entrepreneurship is when you you develop you have a brief a technological breakthrough so you have a solution and you're looking for a problem so it's it's it's quite the opposite but so but that's another not another topic even if you're in a tech entrepreneurship that starts by the need uh it doesn't follow the linear process that i have just described so you don't go look for a product that already exists you need to create your own products and then you you have some hypothesis that it might work with a given client that you you assume that has a need and then you need to build a business model and you test it and then quite often you see that it does not work and the ways to improve is not just changing the business model sometimes you need to change the product sometime you need to change the business models and quite often you need to change both at the same time so uh what for me whether you make a long answer short what makes technological entrepreneurship is this process where you develop your your your you uh you develop your your business needs your business model and your products simultaneously this is uh what um in my opinion what is technology apprenticeship so i i i've gone through more than my six minutes so i'm sorry about that sarah i give you back the word and thank you once again for for being part of this channel thank you so much and don't worry i was i was timing you and you were right on twitch minute so it was very well done so with that um sophie do you can you tell us about how you view tech entrepreneurship and the exciting things that you're doing sure so welcome everyone i'm really glad to be with you um i'm a professor of technology and international entrepreneurship at level university um which means that i teach both science and engineering students how to launch a business in biopharmaceuticals at fix and iet and uh what's specific about my classroom is that i have those students that are really specialized in science and engineering but i also have some business students in my class so what we hope is that it's going to make a successful entrepreneurial teams with people with both expertise meaning science and business so my my research is mainly about the growth internationalization processes of itech firms and what i would like to add to uh the complexity of technology entrepreneurship that fabiano talks about is the international dimension so we know that in that kind of entrepreneurship which is science-based we are dealing with international issues so we have to be aware be proactive be alert and also know who can help us overcome all the issues that might come up with such level of complexity so in terms of being aware it means that we will have as an entrepreneur to see all the different activities that we will have in our business and to see which one of them could gain some competitive advantage of being international for example we know that r d is going on at a global level so we do a lot of r d partnership with people from other countries we do conferences with presentation in foreign countries but it also means that we will have to protect our intellectual property in different countries um at the sourcing level we know there's a lot of shortage right now in terms of equipment but also in terms of the parts we need to build our technology which will become a product so we have to know how it's working and how we can get those different parts so this is another level of complexity um even though our entrepreneurs don't want to produce right away in foreign countries once again they need to know the players so who are the best where they are located how does it work in order to make the right decision at the right time and to plan accordingly of course we are aiming at nice orient in the market so we want to make sure that we have a successful return on our in r d investment so to do that we have to target specific niche in different countries to have a sufficient market and that again increase the the level of complexity once we are aware of all that we want to be alert looking at both the science and business issues issues are going on in the world so we have to keep informed and to build our international network because it doesn't appear right away um on in a second so we have to build it throughout our development process um the people that are in our lab our colleagues are the tomorrow's leaders that are going to be working around the world so we need to keep in touch and we also have to build our local network because they are the ones that could help us out in getting in foreign countries later on and to help us do all that we have of course our university lab that can help us with the uh the prototype that could help us also uh with the university uh incubator to build our business model and there's also the transition that will be smoothed down by our universe incubator to an accelerator that will be specialized and yeah help us get in touch with people from different countries to do art commercialization well thanks sarah back to you thank you so much sophia and i hope we get to pick up on that international flavor as we go through the q a because as we know we're not that big a country population wise and we need to be thinking international right away but we have a bad habit of thinking the international market is the united states so and that's it so i'm really looking forward to hearing more about that in the ensuing discussion and alicia how about you thank you sarah and what a delight to be a part of this panel in this this very important discussion uh this morning i'm already learning things uh about my colleagues and activities and other sides of the country uh i'm alyssia maine i'm the van dusen professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at simon fraser university at the sfu beady school of business where i've been for 21 years so my linkedin profile tells me recently and there i am also academic director of a program that i founded called invention to innovation based on research of my colleagues and i uh in science innovation and science entrepreneurship uh and i am special advisor to our vp research and international on innovation in which capacity i lead the sfu innovates pan university strategy to try to unlock more invention and research-based innovation so i want to touch on a few points this morning in this time that we have and then hopefully later in the questions one is the huge potential that we have in canada from our incredible level of invention uh when looked internationally when compared internationally our scientists our engineers our scholars across the board uh rank in the top one percent of cited publications far more than we should for uh if you were looking proportionally at the research dollars employed um we have pockets of world-leading excellence and sadly on the innovation side we don't meet that same lofty standard so again compared to our oecd competitors um sorry um comparators it's what i meant to say um we uh we fall down in all of the surveys over the last 30 years looking at invention metrics versus innovation metrics so we're sitting on this huge potential and we've seen in the pandemic recently just how important inventions at universities and the spin-offs fueled by university inventions are to solving global problems um university research is vitally important in health it's vitally important to solving the clean energy transition um and and climate solutions and across a wide range of breakthrough invention so how do we mobilize that better so our research my research is in science innovation and science entrepreneurship particularly in deep tech and we founded uh at sfu and i would say at sfubi but it's really across the university we founded the invention to innovation program eye program in 2015 we took it to senate um and did all the things that one has to do within a university and had the champions that one has to have um one of whom is now a president of our university in order to launch a program that's not a money maker for a business school but was serving both the university across faculties and the ecosystem and so this program focused on graduate stem scientists and engineers and on postdoctoral fellows and it has expanded to also focus on professors we get about three professors per year in our four credit program several of whom have been canada research chairs who are eager to go and find out how to make more impact with their with their breakthrough research we also three years ago partnered with my tax uh in order to put some of this programming material into asynchronous format and to offer it more broadly across the country and this year i'm proud to say that that program is offered from coast to coast from victoria uh to halifax and st john and we've had partners in different areas of the country we've had partnerships with queen's university with dalhousie and with memorial in trying to offer this but it's open to any hqp across the country and the idea is again to unlock some of that potential by um allowing scientists and engineers who have ideas that are creating new opportunities to the points that you know fabiano made about these processes happening together to allow them to have the mindset to make early stage decisions and uh to to engage in activities be it around ip be it around market prioritization be it around finding co-founders even before ventures are formed and sometimes when ventures aren't going to be formed there's going to be other ways to make impact with their research but to focus on that and unlocking that potential and at the same time we study this area and we study ventures including ones that respond to the pandemic and have seen what a difference these pre-formation entrepreneurial capabilities can have we've seen scientist entrepreneurs who are very very good at it um and that endow their ventures with a better chance of success and the good news is these skills can also be taught even if you don't happen to land in the research lab of a a very prolific exemplar scientist entrepreneur so um i'm gonna leave it at that um for now i would say to the point that sophie made um about the role of of the research labs that we have in our universities i think that they can play a big role i think it is not just the scientists it's the ecosystem sorry that they're surrounded with um and uh uh and i'm happy i'm hoping that the discussion goes in that direction of things that we can do not only through our education programs but also through our ecosystem to unlock more of our outstanding uh stem innovation potential that's fantastic and well i'll make a note of that for um potential topics down the line but i see that we're already getting q a so we'll see where that goes and sherry do you want to uh finish up with the introductions and we can start doing q a because i already have a million things i want to talk to you guys about sure thank you sarah um so my name is sherry bresnicz i'm an associate professor at the hmong school of global affairs public policy and a member of the innovation policy lab and i am also the director of the masters in global affairs at the hmong school my research initiative started as an economic geographer by focusing on the role of universities and how universities contribute to economic development and very very quick uh it focused on commercialization and where universities contribute to commercialization and you know over the years you know i looked at different aspects of university policy and culture and um um organization you know looking at ttos but you realize we're when you talk about universities and you talk just about mostly about faculty and researchers you miss an entire big part of the university which is our students our students are and if you look at numbers they are the entrepreneurs right and we we tend to ignore that partly because as universities it's hard for us to count it right because there's no way really to follow that um but also because we can't service all of them right and even looking at the you know hearing the amazing programs that our colleagues were talking about you know we tend again to focus on engineering or you know stem students because they have a product or there's technology and one of the things we've been talking here at arts and sciences in fact what happens with students to do you know educational programs or you know social entrepreneurship where where do they fit in in this entire uh thing um and so through through all of this there's there's a few things that um i've seen and researched over time in different universities not just at u of t but one is what do we give our students right what are we providing them in order to make them better entrepreneurs right so let's say they're not in a in a business program where do they get any kind of entrepreneurship approach if they're not phd students so we have accelerators uh incubators and accelerators and more and more universities have more uft has 11 of them uh which always shocks me when i say that um we we do teach for entrepreneurship but again it's very specific programs they're very niche very very small we do some teaching of entrepreneurship in accelerators and again some of them do it better than others and the the big part which i think uoft's been very active on the last couple of years is the ip education teaching students and faculty for that matter that ip's important thinking in canada you know so being non-canadian you know moving here and i'm just you know accepting the canadian approach we actually we want science to be public but the world doesn't play fair and so you know when you talk to americans they're who invented isn't insulin right nobody talks about canada when they talk about that right so there's there's a point of teaching our students that ip is important and ip it's not just patents a piece copyright and and trademarks and all of these things that they go like oh i didn't even know about that right so you know i'm going to leave it at i i think there's there's a lot of good things to talk about there and i'm really excited and to hear more and hear the questions that people are asking so back to you sarah thank you so much and i love that insight of who are we building these programs for and does everyone i feel there's also an inclusivity lens to that of you know who is dominant in the uh in the disciplines that we're aiming our entrepreneurship training at and does that need to be so with that we already have a question in the q a and please to the audience use the q a chat to to put your questions up for our awesome panelists so a first question we have is wondering if there's a difference between how we treat technology entrepreneurs for undergraduates and graduate students and i have opinion on this myself but i'll hold hold that for a moment um and why don't i start with fabiano because you talked about um yeah undergraduate level as well but then i know that everyone on the panel will probably have an opinion on this so i'll go from there well that's a very good question and i'm also i'm still looking for a good answer but anyway uh we one one thing is for sure that there is something uh that i always teach in the undergraduate course that is okay my goal with you is not that you start your business the day after is that you learn how to synchronize your antennas with opportunities because the opportunities might come next year my coming five years my coming ten years but for undergrad and i'm not i'm not concerned about knowing what they have uh as the materials like okay let's explore that we are more on okay rising awareness making them think more entrepreneurial uh even as a nature entrepreneur not not so it's really about forming capabilities competence knowing to think as an entrepreneur for graduate students we have formed here a workshop a one credit workshop for our phd students that think that perhaps their ph.d projects might have a business uh potential so i i it's a small small cohorts like 810 students they come with their phd approach and say hey i'm doing that and then i try to build with them the business model around this idea so one thing is different is that our greater students are more mature they do have something technologically speaking to offer to the to to to to society already very often so we we can start with that and then build entrepreneurial capabilities around it but for undergrad for me is more uh building capabilities and changing the mindset and making them think more entrepreneurs as entrepreneurs so yeah that's that would be my my part of the answer i don't know if anyone wants to complete that yes well if you don't mind i'll call on alicia because i know that mindset comes very quickly up in the eye to eye as well and that's a graduate student program so do you want to build on what fabiano was saying um so i i would say i like um what fabiano said on on trying to build capabilities that are going to serve these students and these alumni you know throughout their careers and they're going to serve in in the innovation ecosystem some of them are going to become you know people in industry who are you know able to help our receptor capacity from university innovation but i would say that in my experience the focus on undergrad and graduate is very different when i've tried to have undergraduate students come into the program we've designed for graduate stem students it hasn't been a great fit uh and um and and they're very important programs for both but i would say that graduate students um and stem phd and post-docs and stem faculty um are this incredible resource that we've spent so much money on uh in our uh you know science innovation ecosystem and in our r d funding and who represents such big potential uh very deep expertise in a certain area uh and that they learn differently and they're motivated differently and my my uh experience has been and as you know sarah that experiential learning around the invention and the research areas that are happening in the lab of those hqp unlocks numbers of things at the same time it's their mindset that you're building for various paths that they may take in the innovation ecosystem and it's also actually real-time building commercialization strategy for university research it can affect the whole culture of their own lab so i think and and that's overkill for an undergrad who hasn't had that experience and doesn't have that deep capability in one area that those 10 000 hours um you know the tipping point right so you're yes building more building on even more capabilities and building up more unleashing even more potential on that commercialization or like in the short term because i don't want to say that undergrads are have less potential but yes yeah um now sophie and we're starting to get lots and lots of questions so i'm not going to go to everyone for every question so if people want to hop up and down and be like no i want to answer that one first please do uh if not sophie i know in our pre-talk you talked about working at the undergrad grad and phd level so i'm wondering if you wanted to build on that before we go to the next question yes i would add maybe one thing is that it depends on the industry in which the uh the students are aiming to build their business for example i would see in my undergrad class that there are more students that are willing to start a business in i.t or in other innovative industries so they they want to build a technology that will be useful to some other technology while in my graduate students i will see more people in either photonics or health science and that has to do with the level of expertise that is needed to build their business but also the product development cycle so if we want to build a vaccine it will take much more uh competences and much more time so we expect we will have more uh graduate student with even some of them have a phd and a postdoc and are still taking in social classes while in our undergraduate classes we have students that want to start business in either video games they want to start apps they want so their interests are different so that's why we change a little bit the uh the focus of our classes but the idea is always to give to build a um entrepreneurial culture within the university to give them the opportunity to cancel entrepreneurship as a career path and also to know about the ecosystem that is there to support them whenever they're ready to launch their business i really like how you are meeting students where they are and where their passions are and where their dreams are and i'm the next question uh i'm going to ask shiri to start because you talked about um the difference between disciplines and where we focus and the question is is there a difference between teaching technology entrepreneurship in an engineering school and in a business school and so i feel that interdisciplinary came has come up as a side uh side theme in a number of the things we've talked about already so do you mind if we start with you sure though i don't don't teach uh entrepreneurship in either so i'm just gonna say that in in uh so i think this is this is really one for sophie and fabiano but i i want to say that for when you look at the research on stem versus non-stem students right stem students tend to get jobs so they don't automatically become entrepreneur you actually need that combination of stem and non-stem student and that's where the business students come in so if you look at our so our latest studies looking at um uft alumni you find that the the startups the entrepreneurs are the combinations are the business school students that also have let's say some stem background or the opposites students that studied commerce and then you know they they moved into engineering it's pretty interesting on that level and i think because they need both aspects of the knowledge to become entrepreneur and part of it is maybe going back to alicia's point is you know where they are in their life cycle right and they have some experience and they've seen some of this process either because they worked in a startup or you know they were part of a startup group but they weren't necessarily the entrepreneurs themselves initially i love that we have a tech entrepreneurship program here where we are deliberately mixing all of the other disciplines with engineering and you get amazing things but we actually have to first teach them not to kill each other and to actually understand each other um and i think that that's that idea of early stage culture change is going to continue to be a theme here with with that uh fabiano i see you have taken yourself off mute so i'm going to assume you want to talk yeah yeah yeah well uh well as you have never i all my teaching experience in business schools are more uh punctual interventions at courses so he has invited me to go to our university some years ago i teach more foreign for engineers but uh what i'm going to share is a discussion i have with my police for marcia so you have a very good relationship with the the department of entrepreneurship and luis is the director uh we very often we we we we discussed a little bit and uh once once gets a he hits on the second they say hey we need you from polytechnic because uh a lot of students will particularly come here to follow our accelerator programs and so on but we have a tendency to consider the product that they come with as a black box and we work just a business model we know that sometimes the good ways to change the problem but since we don't have the competence to do it we we work too much on the business model and not too much in the product and uh in engineering school is the opposite so we uh we looked too much at the box the product and we forgot to look at okay what is the application of that so we we fall in love with the solution we have just created and we don't care if there is a good business model behind if there is a client that is interested on that so when you're teaching for engineers you need to stress business uh look at the clients don't fall in love with with your product and when you go to business school you have to say hey it's not just about business you need to to make sure that the offer sometimes the way to improve it is to change the offer not to change the business model there's no miracle you can do that so uh that would be my my answer to that question i think that's an incredibly important point to make um alicia i see that you were also off mute does that mean that you wanted to comment no okay all right so actually i'm going to throw to you next though because one of the questions in the chat uh follows what we some of the things that have been brought up around culture change but particularly for something that focuses on labs um giving entrepreneurship skills to graduate students is very important but sometimes they might not have the support of their supervisors to explore them how can we bring in supervisors to the conversation how can we help supervisors understand the value for their students to gain these kind of skills question end yeah can i please start with you alyssia great thank you um i think supervisors are a huge piece of the equation particularly for uh graduate students and you know my experience has been mainly with stem and i think it's because the program that we developed was basically about unlocking science innovation so that's the kind of students who really benefited the most from it i fully agree that you need to have business linked into there and and and co-founders but in the stage where we're trying to provide mindset it's very early stage and so it's often passing them on to another program afterwards where they meet the next business people and um so i would say the supervisors are really important because these um these grad students uh you know they're they're embedded in the lab of a supervisor there could be you know a lab that's as many as 20 grad students um the the supervisor is the person who is signaling uh what's okay to spend your time on and when we first developed this program and took it to senate you know of course we had to do some polling of supervisors and of grad students finding out if there was you know a need for the program what kind of barriers and constraints if people were going to vote for it in the senate um and uh i had a physics professor a supervisor pi who uh wrote back and said are you kidding are you going to take my grad students out of my lab every wednesday night like what are you thinking and you know it's like oh her grad student but uh that same pi came to um an event that we held a few years later and was a huge convert she could see what it was doing for the grad students she could see that there was actually an advantage back to their research lab that their translational grants um were more successful and that she had you know another person that could help write those translational brands and so so i do think that actually making sure that the supervisors understand what's in it for their research impact to have their graduate students get this training as well as that it's something that is going to serve them well um in their uh in their career and um i wanted to add to sherry's point whereas i fully agree that people that have a tech you know education the tech sector have an easier time getting employment that gets less true as you go on to the phd and so you know we're finding and reports um from the canadian council academies etc find that uh a shocking number of our phd uh graduates in canada aren't first aren't getting tenure-track jobs but secondly aren't even getting jobs in industry that are commensurate with their experience and you know ideally we'd like those grads to be leading innovation in industry and become our receptor capacities and bridges to universities and to do so we have to equip them and it does start with the supervisor thank you alicia and you answered a question another question in the chat while you were at it so that worked out very well um sherry do you want to comment on that one as well because i know your ex feels there too yeah so i i i think there's there's two issues here i think alicia's correct is about we you have to bring the supervisor in so they you know even if you think about faculty commercialization the success of inventions going through and becoming successful innovation is whether the faculty actually bought in whether they're chaperoning this invention through the process right and it's the same thing for the students but we also have to understand that most i'd say most faculty did not go into universities because they wanted to be entrepreneurs right so you know we have that problem we need to make sure though that they do have the information to provide the students so even if let's say take that faculty before they were changed to be able to say look i'm not the person but felicia has this amazing program maybe you should if you're interested in this you should go there and i think we still don't have that information in most universities right so if a lot of times if the faculty decided that they're not interested and you know the students get the signal that it's not interesting but they also don't provide them with the tools where to go and if we are good and we we have you know accelerators that can provide that knowledge maybe outside of the lab or programs that can provide this information so at least we have support for students or at least knowledge what's the next step or who do you need to go and talk to because a lot of times things fall apart because they didn't even get the information you know i don't know where to go you know universities are huge you know they don't even know which office they're supposed to contact right so i think the knowledge and providing this knowledge to faculty whether they want to supervise the students through commercialization or not but at least providing them with information where to go to in order to learn to become better in entrepreneurship is important i think that's so critical we talk about at sfu um never dropping anyone off of a cliff and that is you know it's not great if we rev them up and get them all excited and then say i have nothing for you now and i don't even know where to point you that's not fair um so one of my questions and if you don't mind i think i'll start with sophie oh actually sophie did you want to answer that question i saw your mic go off well um i would simply add that there are some supervisors that are really good at it and they succeeded many times before so these are the ones that we can use as ambassadors to explain to their colleagues how to do it and why do they do it and how is it useful for the lab for example some students are coming in to graduate studies to to change the world they want to have that big technology that will bring some good to the world so they they want to they have in mind that maybe someday they're going to launch their business and they will choose their lab regarding the the kind of supervisor that that they want if and if there's a supervisor that is well known and has previous success in startups well it might attract them so um some supervisor will tell you that they they like to do it because they like the energy that they have in their lab because it brings a certain personality uh threat in their graduate students and it gives a good energy in their lab and that's one of the reason why they're doing it also absolutely who you choose makes a huge difference um and i've spoken to deans who said you know we don't have enough entrepreneurship in our faculty why not and i said well do you hire for entrepreneurial people and like oh like well there would be one place to start um speaking of graduates with scientific backgrounds and uh if you don't mind uh sophia me to call back to you again um what are your thoughts on programs to help graduates with scientific backgrounds that want to create ventures but perhaps are not necessarily within the university laboratory so what do you what do you do with people who have already graduated well there are incubators and actuators that that could be helpful for that uh some are specialized in the different industries or some are more general if there's not a an incubator that really specializes in the industry that people are aiming at and they have a training program they have um a coach that could help them they have the infrastructure so we have all the ecosystems that it's already there that could be helpful for people who want to launch their business in science uh we see that there's maybe um a higher percentage of people that are starting business and science that are coming from the industry so that's important that they they know also where to go so that's why we're uh we're seeing a lot of engineers and accelerators working together to always forget the first the potential entrepreneur to the right organization that could help them and sometimes they are even um joining efforts to give the best program for example if the science entrepreneur is located in a rural region it's possible to have some services there but also to have some other um training and coach that are accessible and that are from other parts of the well that are nationwide that makes such good sense of bringing in the accessibility angle and also of course you know we all know that the entrepreneurial journey is never linear and so you don't know if you spark this mindset and spark this passion in your class and then two years later now they come across the opportunity they want to work on so making sure that you have those inroads back into your university and incubators makes all the sense which is starting to answer some of the culture questions going on in the chat i have so many more questions this is one that i find really fascinating um because so often you know the kpis associated with university entrepreneurship are around patents etc so one of our guests asked how are entrepreneurship programs for students how should they be evaluated in universities or what are the main indicators and again i have an opinion but i want to make sure that i don't color the conversation too much so alicia do we do you mind if i start with you sure i'd be happy to um so i get uh you know it's to to quote a colleague of mine i respect a lot you get what you measure um uh sarah's written a great white paper on this um but uh i would say that it depends on the program that you're and what you're trying to create with that particular program uh that the metrics will change i would say that in the program that we're developing we actually care about the hqp's path um through different paths and some of those will be um you know founding eventually founding um you know science-based ventures that wouldn't be founded before that you know have the the degree of the impact that they can have on um on global issues is important the fact that they can export globally but there's going to be a lag um there is uh also paths are the jobs that they get in industry and the fact that they pivoted um and and the responsibility they're given in industry you know leading new product development or innovation strategies another path is translational grants that they start to get right and and how to fabiano's point how things are changing in the lab and in the product development so i would say all of those are important and on that latter point i think something that you could measure real time certainly surveys of how capabilities have changed of the people in the program but but i would say real time you could measure the change in the technology readiness level um for stem uh you know graduate uh entrepreneurs i think that's a really important measure helping that translational path i'll leave it there fantastic um sherry do you want to talk about a little bit about that too yeah so if you look at if when we measure uh success of accelerators for example we look at what happened to these firms right so we look at growth in number of employees and growth in number of products right so because they're all tiny when they start and especially when they go into accelerators and and what you you know so i'm thinking about the quote alicia so yes you measure uh you get what you measure but the point is um so ontario had a program called um um what i'm going to cla program which is uh all about creating accelerators for universities right um and and it was about teaching for entrepreneurship so that the mandate was teaching for entrepreneurship so if we measure whether those accelerators were teaching for entrepreneurship say all of them passed all around ontario no matter which university but then when you start to see the evaluate the quality of these firms right their survival rate their products their growth then you get a different picture then you see some of these accelerators are providing better tools for those students and companies than others and then there's a question do we want to build on it right and say okay you know so we now have a different goal so at least it's correct we're saying we can measure whatever but if you we want to measure success in entrepreneurship that's pretty defined right the entrepreneurship success is not about just learning how to be an entrepreneur it's actually becoming an entrepreneur and if we go even deeper than this if you're taking what you know basing this on what we teach at universities so we're becoming a company that's related to the topic that the students start studying then it's even more specific right so there are ways to measure it and we know that there are programs that are better than others and some of it is based on who runs the program so serial entrepreneurs running the program or having them mentor or involved in the accelerator is important actually having a selection process so you know we have some accelerators that i just accept everybody but having a selection process is important and the the third thing is actually having a program so not just come to our accelerators we are fun we're going to help you but you actually have to go through this program and the program has goals and you have to achieve certain things over time that's a totally different kind of a program then come here and come to see to listen to lectures and you know meet people i have a network right so i i think that is pretty true to every you know article i read about entrepreneurship in general and about you know student and faculty entrepreneurship specifically fantastic so i'm gonna ask fabiano because uh we have a program at the tech entrepreneurship program here we look at and go you might start a company you might not start a company but you know if you have developed an internal mindset you developed on interdisciplinary teams that haven't killed each other that was a win so whatever you go on and do after that so how do you guys look at it well uh just i'm gonna answer this question first of all just adding to uh what sherry and alicia just said on how do we measure the performance i totally agree with alicia we should advocate the measure with the the ghost the program uh the the program goals and uh in our case the undergraduate students in an engineering school for us i have discussed that with uh with uh our office here so how could we measure if we did a good job in making our students more entrepreneurs and now three things that i that that i remember from that discussion is that well one thing that we should measure is did we rise the intention of entrepreneurship in our students so that would be okay we did a job on awareness so now they think of entrepreneurship as an option so that that would be a good thing but just intention is not enough so we should also follow the students after they graduate to see if we have an increase of the rates from intention to action to interpret to to to be an interpreter so that's and that's harder to measure but anyway that we're just hypothetically discussing how to measure that and uh in engineering school well since we have zero entrepreneurial skills in the program so can we measure how we have developed more entrepreneurial skills no especially interpersonal skills uh business skills so um having basis on marketing basis on uh other stuff then of course it's important in every school that you you are able to design a bridge that does not fall that's the ultimate goal of engineering school but these other skills are also more and more important for our students so uh now going back to your question sir yes uh uh we do consider here that uh corporate entrepreneurship entrepreneurship is uh uh one possible uh exit for our students so we what what we do in our courses in undergrad courses we really dedicate one one one session just to talk about entrepreneurship entrepreneurship programs so how can we use entrepreneurial skills as an employee and how can you later on become an entrepreneur or a partner of your your former company by that so we we do focus a little bit on that because we know that for a lot of our students that's going to be their experience their actual experience with with entrepreneurship that's definitely important to think about especially at the undergrad where you're not sure what they're going to do later on now there's a really very kind comments in the comment section first saying how much they're enjoying the panel but at the end of the question there is what is the rule of language in recruitment to new innovators and do we need to be revisiting our language and i know that we at sfu we've been looking at this and very much shaped by a book i was reading called metaphors we live by and the power of the language that you use um and sophie you had talked about these different disciplines early on so do you mind if i start with that question how you use the right language to recruit these kind of students well i believe that if we use a language of skills and of dreams because we know that when people are starting a business if they have a growth intention at the beginning they will they will keep it but if they don't have it when they start a business that's not gonna appear somehow so um it's to make people dream about what they could do if what they dream to achieve and the skills that they need to acquire and then the skills that we're gonna build with them are gonna be useful whether if they start their business or if they go work in a startup or if they go work in another firm they will be maybe um entrepreneurship entrepreneurs so we need them to have the skills the the leadership to do it um another thing about language is um whatever they they they start a business or not they need to be able to explain how a technology is useful not only how it works but how it is useful so if they they they end up being working in a large firm and they have to sell the technology they have to make a sales pitch to a investor well they they are able to adapt their language to the people they are singing so that's why having students that are both from business and science together it helps them use the right language and to translate the technology into words that people and from the general population will understand so uh i would make that a big difference the big the difference between how does it work and how is it useful i love i think i'm going to try to borrow that in in the future looking at skills and dreams um alicia i see that you have your mic off so i know that you're going to want to uh comment on that as well yes i i couldn't agree more uh with sophie and the the idea of you know looking at what they want to accomplish and and their visioning um and uh and giving them that language and that being an important goal and actually something that we should be uh we should be trying to capture as a metric of of what these uh students and http are getting out of these programs but uh i'd also say that the language of how you talk to the people that you would like to attract this training you would like to equip with these skills is really important um about two-thirds of the people that come into the eye-to-eye and the my tax eye programs uh for for innovation skills um would never walk into a business school or an accelerator and in fact many of them actually will tell us after a few weeks that they thought business was evil and they think about it like like a dilbert cartoon and so the language one is going to them going to their research areas i often give a research lecture from my research and then talk about the skills that these scientists may have uh employed and then say by the way there's a training program that these can you know that you you're welcome to join and that are you know that are sponsored um uh but but the language that i think appeals to these highly talented scientists and engineers is making impact from their research and that's true whether you start a startup or whether you are able to better position your your idea to frame it in the language that as you suggest sophie um and as you find uh in how it's useful to be able to partner with strategic alliance partners to be able to be more successful in getting translational research funding but also in making that useful that those experiments that are translational experiments so i think the framing about creating impact is very powerful with uh um you know with some of our hqp in canada i think this is uh leaving it at impact and dreams um and unlocking potential it's probably an excellent place uh to start wrapping up this really impressive and inspirational discussion and um if we you put in a question in the chat and we didn't get to it i'm sorry we only had so much time but clearly we've sparked a lot of food for thought and there's a really good chance that all of our panelists will get some outreach to continue the discussion um this has been such a cool way to talk about not just the importance of science and tech entrepreneurship and how we need them to we need to be focusing on this as a country um often thinking about going international what the differences are between tech and like digital tech entrepreneurship and what my supervisor used to call stuff you can drop on your foot and also the science-based entrepreneurship and the complexities that are dealing with business model complexities scientific complexities scale-up complexities technology complexities all at once but needing to be able to create those ecosystems and creating those conditions and all of our panelists have done such amazing inspiring work to start to craft and shift those ecosystems and you know we we need this for our country we need this for the world to solve big problems and i love just back to what sophie and alicia were talking about our students also need this because it gives them the potential to unlock the impact they want to make and to unlock their dreams so this kind investing in this kind of entrepreneurship is a win for everybody so i wanted to say a huge thank you to our panelists who've lent so much uh inspiration and insight and i'm sure we'll be getting lots of outreach now to be talking about the amazing things they're doing and a huge uh thank you to the monk innovation policy lab 4.0 because this has been such a delight to be able to host so thank you all so much and we will wrap up oh and thank you sarah for the amazing amazing work as a moderator thank you sarah thank you very much i appreciate it and thank you to everyone who came out and had gave such fantastic questions

2021-11-30 21:59

Other news