Innovacorp president and CEO Clifford Gross has left an organization that is much different than the one he took over in January of 2011. It’s incredible how the Halifax-based provincial agency has evolved in a year.

I think it’s fair to say that Gross took over an incubator that had an investment component, yet he’s leaving an investment agency that also nurtures the companies it backs and others. It has also served as the Nova Scotia government’s point of contact in a rapidly evolving investment climate.

Innovacorp announced the third week of February that Gross had left the Hollis Street office and will be replaced in the interim by Innovacorp chair Jacquelyn Thayer Scott. The agency is now looking for its fifth CEO (when you include a couple of interim heads) in three years.

Before assessing what Gross did in his short-but-sweet tenure, it’s worth noting that he had big shoes to fill. He was succeeding Dan MacDonald, a veteran of the California tech world who transformed Innovacorp into something special, an agency that in 2010—shortly after MacDonald’s departure, when then interim CEO Stephen Hartlen ran the show—won the prestigious National Business Incubation Association’s international award.

Given its strong tailwinds, I’m not sure anyone expected change when Gross took the helm, but change it did. Suddenly, the investment division was on steroids. Patrick Keefe, a former entrepreneur and consultant who holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, was appointed VP of investment, and his staff was strengthened as Gregory Phipps, former VC officer at BDC, and Thomas Rankin, a cleantech wunderkind, came on board.

In the past six or seven months, Innovacorp has invested in a range of truly exciting companies: $1 million in Livelenz Inc.; $1 million in aioTV Inc.; a small contribution to the $1.7 million raised by GoInstant; $300,000 in Billdidit; $250,000 in TitanFile Inc.; $250,000 in Marcato Digital Solutions; and $250,000 in Health Outcomes Worldwide.

On top of that, the agency has just concluded its biennial I-3 competition, during which DeNovaMed Inc. of Halifax received $200,000 in funding and nine other enterprises were given smaller awards.

During Gross’s tenure, Innovacorp also opened its life sciences building in Halifax, which houses such companies as CarbonCure Technologies, Immunovaccine, and Resolution Optics. It also launched the CleanTech Open, which has identified 10 cleantech companies from around the world in the running to receive funding as long as they set up shop in Nova Scotia.

If that’s not enough, Gross served as Nova Scotia’s point man in the negotiations to create the regional venture capital fund, to which Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have each committed $15 million. Those talks have taken longer than expected, but they continue. The fund was due to open this month but that deadline has probably dragged by a few months.

So I would say that Gross’s single year at the helm was a successful one, but you have to wonder where the agency goes from here. For the time being, it will be steered in the same direction as before.

Investment team members have been told to keep doing what they were doing in 2011. They will aim to back good companies at the same pace as in recent months, and from what I understand they have the financial resources to do so. Thayer Scott has taken over Gross’s seat in the regional VC Fund talks and intends to guide Innovacorp in the same direction as did its former CEO.

The big questions facing the organization are who will be the new CEO and will he or she continue with current policies. Time will tell.