Dal Innovates, the innovation arm of Dalhousie University, plans to launch the Scientific Venture Program this autumn, rounding out a suite of programs designed to develop entrepreneurial thinking.
The program will help people working on post-doctoral research to develop companies based on their scientific work. It was developed by Montreal’s Concordia University, which modeled it on the Runway Startup Postdoc Program developed by Cornell Tech. Concordia wants to expand the program across Canada and Dal is the first Canadian university to adopt it.
Scientific Venture will be the latest of about half a dozen entrepreneurship programs introduced at Dal in recent years. In an interview, Dal Assistant Vice-President of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Jeff Larsen said the main goal of these programs is not to produce more startups so much as to nurture entrepreneurial thinking among its young charges.
“Our overall mission is that we want to build more innovators and entrepreneurs,” said Larsen. “Then those people can work in government or the healthcare system or for established companies, or start their own companies. We need more entrepreneurial thinking everywhere.
“The second part of the mission is to get more companies, but if we do the first part of our job well then we hope it will take care of that second part.”
In the past three years, Dal has developed a group of programs that target primarily mature members of the academic community – post-graduates, post-docs and researchers. The thinking is that the greatest opportunity lies in converting scientific discoveries into commercial products, so the programs so far focus on people working in scientific research. Larsen was quick to add that under-graduates and others also take part.
He added that the programs demand different levels of commitment from the participants. Some offer an introductory workshop and others require the founders to make a full-time commitment over a few months.
The programs are:
- Path2Innovation – These two-day “awareness-building” workshops expose researchers to the bare essentials of entrepreneurship, often just to assess whether they’re interested in pursuing it further.
- Scientist2Entrepreneur -- This online program, developed by Concordia, builds on Path2Innovation through a cohort that lasts 12 weeks.
- Lab2Market – Deepening the curriculum further, L2M requires a full-time commitment over two-and-a-half months. It uses such methods as customer discovery to assess the market opportunity of researchers’ technology. Memorial, Ryerson and Manitoba universities also offer this program.
- Ready2Launch – Dal’s summer accelerator, open to students and researchers across Atlantic Canada, offers funding and instruction to help launch a company.
- CDL-Atlantic – Dal hosts the East Coast hub of the Creative Destruction Lab, which provides mentorship and funding for scaling companies through a nine-month cohort.
- Dal also oversees the Emera IdeaHub, which helps young companies that are working on hardware projects. The IdeaHub includes the Design2Build program to offer these companies curriculum.
As well as these programs, Dal is involved with several different “sandboxes”, a group of facilities around Nova Scotia that allow students to come together to dabble in entrepreneurship and swap ideas. Dal is a member of these sandboxes, with the sector they’re known for in brackets: Shiftkey Labs (IT); Cultiv8 for agtech (agtech); Surge (oceantech); and Pulse (healthcare).
Larsen said the next phase of development is to address the entrepreneurial ambitions of under-graduates. The university now offers a minor in entrepreneurship in almost all faculties, and is working on complementing this with other programs.
