Corporate and statup communities should embrace a new collaborative model for innovation that will hasten the next wave of technology, Coca-Cola Co.’s head of innovation told a Fredericton audience Wednesday night.

David Butler told the R3 Gala that corporations and startups operate in dramatically different environments. So the best way for established businesses to nurture startups and benefit from their pioneering mentality is to contract them to solve problems.

Butler, the Vice-President of Innovation at the Atlanta-based beverage giant, calls the process a “co-creation system” and said Coke is now using it to solve big problems. The company simply tells startup communities about a big problem it’s having and lets the geeks come up with a solution. The result is often a new business that can solve similar problems for a range of companies, and Coke becomes the first client, brings the startup on to its Founders’ Platform and offers seed investment.

“Think about the assets you have in your company,” Butler told the business people in the audience. “Now think of what would happen to local entrepreneurs with a co-creation system. Think of how big it could be.”

Butler was the keynote speaker at the dinner, hosted by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation,  which honoured the work of three practical researchers in New Brunswick whose efforts were improving the province’s economy.

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Butler said the ecosystems for startups and traditional corporations are as different as a coral reef and desert. And corporations can try to innovate by acquiring startups, setting up accelerators or acting like startups. But such efforts would be as disastrous as expecting fish from a coral reef to thrive in a desert.

“It’s not that it just doesn’t work -- it’s that the models are flawed,” said Butler. “So we tried to come up with a new model, one that we think will be responsible for the next wave of innovation.”

He cited examples in the U.S., Australia and Vietnam in which Coke had told tech entrepreneurs about their problems and the result was a new startups. For example, Coke wanted to know more about when to stock vending machines and what to put in them. Sydney-based Hivery, which is offering predictive analytics to a range of food companies, is now on the Founders’ Platform.

The focus of the R3 dinner was on the pioneering work of three researchers:

- Liuchen Chang is an expert in renewable energy conversion and systems. He has developed ways for energy to flow from small sources on to the grid, rather than just having the grid just deliver electricity from big plants. Chang's research has allowed a variety of different types of energy sources to be added to the grid at varying voltages.

- Alain Doucet has worked with several small and medium-sized businesses to develop a variety of innovations. For example, he and his team developed a “plug and play” type of adapter for Leading Edge Geomatics’ aircraft that allows them to exchange a range of highly sophisticated aerial surveying equipment. Before that, the company was required to have a separate aircraft for every configuration – just to meet Transport Canada certification. Now it has a permanent, certified mounting system that fits all of its equipment.

- Amber Garber of the Huntsman Marine Science Centre has developed a selective breeding program for salmon. Her salmon broodstock have a higher growth rate and are resistant to sea lice and bacterial kidney disease. Sea lice resistance reduces the need to bathe the fish in peroxide, which makes the fish stop eating for at least a week. Bacterial kidney disease resistance significantly reduces the need to use antibiotics.