Joining forces: business and non-profits

How can non-profits best engage businesses in their social change efforts?

This was the topic of a recent tele-seminar from Tamarack, part of a monthly series of nation-wide conference calls on topics in community engagement. Entitled “Engaging the Business Sector in Social Efforts,” the seminar featured John Weiser and Garry Loewen, both experts and published authors in this field of business-non-profit collaboration.

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Awarding innovation in Ontario

Have a new product or service based on breakthrough technology?

The Premier’s Catalyst Awards are open for another round of nominations. The Catalyst Awards recognize excellence and leadership in innovation, providing five awards of $200,000. All you have to do is develop a commercially successful new, or significantly improved, product or service based on breakthrough technology.

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Michael Detleftsen stresses innovation in interview

Investment in agri-food innovation is key while food prices continue to climb. That’s what Michael Detlefsen, President of Global Ceres Ag Corporation, says in an interview for The Business News Network’s After Hours program.

Detlefson was part of a panel of experts discussing global rising food prices at an event at MaRS last month. BNN’s Kim Parlee moderated the event and then interviewed Michael Detlefsen asking him more questions about the agricultural economics and opportunities.

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I’m very excited that one of my first interviews in my role as “Online Content Producer” at MaRS is with WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. He’s appearing at WordCamp 2008 in Toronto, and I’ll be showing up, Sony Z7U and microphone in hand.

But I’m a bit nervous about the line of questioning, seeings as I’m not an open source software developer.

I’m lucky that through my position I’m able to liase with brilliant minds like Paul Jara from 43n79w.com, and he’s given me this preliminary list of questions to ask Matt. But thought I’d ask you, the MaRS community of entrepreneurs and innovators, as well.

Any questions you’d like me to ask Mr. Mullenweg?? Let’s crowdsource.

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Are food prices too low?

Recently, MaRS hosted a Global Leadership Series event, Rising Food Prices: Global Dynamics & Canada’s Response. MaRtian Chris Evans wrote a great recap on the MaRS Blog, here.

I’ve been interested in food politics since taking a seminar on the global ecology of food with Josée Johnston. There, I discovered the work of Wayne Roberts, a journalist and activist who chairs the Toronto Food Policy Council and has a weekly column in NOW Magazine on food and environmental and social justice issues.

I was excited to see Roberts’ take on the Rising Food Prices panel in this week’s NOW. Like panelist John Johnson of RBC, Roberts points out that food prices remain at historic lows, and that, counterintuitively, cheap food actually exacerbates the global food crisis:
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I’ve recently had the luxury of diving into the Naomi Klein’s international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

A well researched and an engaging read, this is not a very cheerful, but certainly a thought-provoking, book. It highlights the subtle power of academia in the society. Take, for example, Chicago’s School of Economics record of influence under the intellectual leadership of Milton Friedman. Or, say, the power of a particular funding mechanism in shaping scientific inquiry and controlling access to new knowledge and ideas.

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Archimedes and his Eureka! moment

Genius may be 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, but that 1% is pretty critical. Jonah Lehrer examines the science behind inspiration in a recent piece in The New Yorker (PDF here).

For scientists from Archimedes to Newton, moments of sudden insight have led to incredible breakthroughs. Now, neuroscientists at Northwestern and MIT are piecing together how these insights actually occur. Their research suggests that insights originate in the brain’s right hemisphere, the region involved in making broad and novel connections, while the prefrontal cortex, which regulates brain activity, instantly recognizes the insight and makes your conscious mind aware of it.

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Collaboration is very easy to talk about. It’s on everyone’s lips.

Making collaboration work beyond the handshake – particularly across fields and fiefdoms – is much tougher, requiring a fine balance of skill, respect, neutrality and, underlying it all, trust.

As a start-up with an ambitious mandate – building global companies from Canadian innovation – MaRS has certainly worked collaboratively to bring talented, committed people from different spheres together through inventive on-site programming, expanding and leveraging professional and personal networks, and fostering an active online community at marsdd.com that now draws in excess of 400,000 page views a month.

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Ontario is a “hotbed of research”

Ontario is one of the world’s 20 best biotech places, according to the June 2008 report issued by Genome Technology Online.

Our province was given a high ranking due to a large number of resident biotech companies (120 private and 26 public companies), the presence of major research initiatives such as the Ontario Genomics Institute and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the creation of a biotech-focused zone in downtown Toronto anchored by our own MaRS Discovery District.

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