Posts tagged ‘innovation policy’

Suggestions for public support to entrepreneurs (troubling facts about MaRS Discovery District – Part 4 of 4)

April 27th, 2010 by Greg Boutin
Sunrise at North Point Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Image via Wikipedia

As my previous posts show, Ontario’s current hub-centric model for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship is expensive, unfair, and ineffective. The Minister of Research and Innovation should take note and explore alternative models, rather than continuing to pour taxpayer’s dollars into an expanding bureaucratic network with high fixed costs and built-in inefficiencies.

The Chamber of Commerce in Ottawa has taken notice too and is criticizing the lack of oversight of OCRI and its expansion in activities it traditionally conducted, according to an article in the Ottawa Business Journal yesterday.

To explore alternatives and fuel a discussion, I have highlighted a menu of options below. As a disclaimer, I am not a policy expert on the matter of entrepreneurship, but a practitioner, so do please consider those as draft proposals for crowdsourced discussion and improvement.

(more…)

7 Comments »

Troubling facts about MaRS Discovery District (Part 2 of 4)

April 9th, 2010 by Greg Boutin
Champagne tower.

Image via Wikipedia

Two days ago I wrote about the $470K salary of the MaRS Discovery District CEO (also UofT president spouse), the $130M in subsidies the institution pocketed between 2002 and 2008, and the deficit in public reporting. Today I take a look into the results of all that spending. (more…)

No Comments »

Troubling facts about MaRS Discovery District (Part 1 of 4)

April 7th, 2010 by Greg Boutin
MaRS Discovery District, Toronto. www.marsdd.com/

Image via Wikipedia

At a time when the Ontario provincial government is feeling heat on the executive compensation of public-sector CEOs, I think a deeper look into MaRS Discovery District is warranted. Growthroute had some affiliation with the hub last year as we were referred a couple of projects. I raised my concerns with some insiders about the opacity of those decisions and general “clubiness” level of the institution.

Since then, and in spite of excellent results (I’ll expand and back this in one of the next posts), we have not been referred anything – as expected when I raised my concerns. Instead, we continue to see money handed over to consultants through personal networks, expansion into viable private services, and a hiring frenzy at salaries most start-ups would be envious of.

To those who think bad feelings may affect this post, you are right – and that’s why I have documented all facts and tried to highlight personal experience and opinions as such. And as I found out, I am certainly in good company in Toronto, as so many entrepreneurs and leaders have issues with the way things are run at this innovation hub!

In the first post of this series, I will focus on compensation, expanding on numbers recently raised by @StartupNorth on twitter, and the deficit in public reporting.

“Competitive” compensation

The CEO of MaRS Discovery District in Toronto was paid $471,874 in 2008 and $437,500 in 2007. The information first surfaced in a 2008 MacLeans article on the President of UofT – who happens to be the husband of MaRS’s CEO and makes over $380K from UofT, before substantial benefits.

That salary made MaRS’s CEO one of the highest-paid public employees in Ontario, and the 4th highest-paid person in the “Other Public Sector Employers” category – right after the leaders of Canadian Blood Services, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the Ontario Power Authority. This is more than the salary of CBC’s head, although he manages an organization that is a hundred times larger. (more…)

6 Comments »

Blog comments showing in Canadian Business print magazine this week

July 19th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

I am glad to report that Canadian Business decided to reprint the main part of a post I wrote in May on this blog, pointing out the weakness of their argument against the Green Energy Act.

It’s not online so I can’t point to it, but you will find it on P8 of the August 17, 2009 issue (they pre-date their magazine), the first comment on the page, entitled “California Dreamin’” (unfortunately this title misleads the reader about the nature of the argument, but let’s not be too picky…)  The fact that they publish a pretty strong critique like this one speaks volume about the willingness of the magazine to show all sides of a story. Kudos to Canadian Business!

No Comments »

Canadian Business magazine’s criticism of the Green Energy Act misses the mark

May 30th, 2009 by Greg Boutin
Wind Energy - A New Kind of Power Generation i...
Image by thinkpanama via Flickr

Canadian Business missed the mark in its poorly researched editorial on Ontario’s Green Energy Act and the Emerging Technologies Fund in the June 15 issue.

I support innovative ventures in the cleantech space on a daily basis through my consulting practice at Growthroute, and I recently co-authored an article entitled “Could Ontario be the Next Germany?” with regard to both the Act and the Fund, published in Renewable Energy World Magazine, the most widely-read magazine on clean energy.

As we all know, Ontario has been pouring money by the billion into the car manufacturing industry and other dinosaurs. It is about time some public support be devoted to innovation in cleantech. (more…)

No Comments »