Professor, Researcher, Entrepreneur

U of T Engineering has been at the leading edge of entrepreneurship in Canada, with many of its professors turning their research innovation into commercialized products – under their very own company banners. Among the many entrepreneurs and their more than 100 spin-off companies, The Engineering Newsletter asked four professors about how they found success both in the lab and in the business world.



Professor Andrew Goldenberg (MIE)

As the founder and Director of the Robotics & Automation Laboratory, Professor Andrew Goldenberg’s research in robotics and automation has resulted in 33 patents. He is the founder and President of two successful spin-off companies: Engineering Services Inc. (ESI), a high-technology company that develops robotics-based automation technologies, and Anviv Mechatronics Inc., which is involved in the development of state-of-the-art mechatronics products. He was recently awarded the Entrepreneurship Medal at the Ontario Professional Engineers Awards.

Why did you decide to start up your own company?

When I joined U of T as a professor, I had come from industry. I always had this feeling and this need to relate research and practice. For many years at the university, I was fully immersed in the research, in other words, it wasn’t about applying the research, but it was for the pursuit of research excellence. After about ten years, I started having doubts, in the sense that I didn’t see the connection between the academics and the market.

It took me about two years to think about, and be convinced, that I had to open up. By about 1994, some of my grad students came to me, and asked, “Why don’t we make a commercial enterprise?” So in 1995, I started hiring people, and it started growing into something commercial.

Today, my companies reflect my need to make the work of academia even more useful.
 
How many people work for you?

Right now, about 24. But we are also in the process of hiring.

How can the Faculty enrich the Engineering students’ outlook, in terms of entrepreneurship?

Professors should communicate to students that research excellence is important, but so is stressing the jobs aspect of Engineering. The role of the professor is to be realistic, to make it clear. After four years, they will graduate, and so they have to tell the students about preparing for finding or creating jobs.

There is a social requirement to create jobs. In the domain of robotics, there are so many problems that you can address and solve – today.

Did you initially know anything about starting a business?

No. I’m still learning. Right now, I’m negotiating a contract, and it’s difficult. Learning business is a very big undertaking, from financing to patents – I think I could give a lecture on patents by now – to law, to licensing. There is a lot to learn.

What do you learn as an engineer that can be applied to entrepreneurship?

We are systematic. We tend to divide things into compartments and deal with each and assign solutions to each. The business side is not as systematic, however, there are a lot of empirical ways of doing things in business, and they come from experience and gut feelings. But, having the training in engineering allows me to line up what is most important and what is less important, to prioritize.

Are there any future ventures?

We will be spinning off three or four companies by the next year (from ESI). We are dealing with a number of industries, military, medical, space products. The company has reached a point where it needs to expand, so in order to do that properly, by 2012, there will be ESI and as many as four companies spun off. This way, the growth is based on the company’s abilities to succeed on their own, financially and commercially.

Do you have advice for those who want to start a business? Is there a recipe for success?

There is no such thing as a recipe for success. And people should not aim to be entrepreneurs to just make money. You also have to love it. I love entrepreneurship; it is very exciting to me.

It’s also hard work, and it requires you to be on the go. Even when I’m on vacation, I have my laptop with me, and I have my phone with me, checking email. That is something an entrepreneur has to do. You've got to be connected, there are things happening every day. But I don’t have a problem with that, because I have a job that I enjoy.

Professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, IBBME)

Molly Shoichet holds the Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering, was named a Royal Society of Canada Fellow, and one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40. In 1998, she co-founded BoneTec Corp., a company designed to promote bone regeneration after injury. In 2002, she founded MatRegen Corp., which focused on diabetes and the long-term delivery of therapeutic peptides.

Why did you decide to start your spin-off companies?

When I returned to Canada from the US where I was working at a biotech company, I realized that there was an opportunity to build a biotech community in Toronto, taking advantage of the wealth of biodiscovery in our city. My goal is to advance our understanding to practical application, to make difference in human health. The latter goes beyond the academic mandate and is best achieved in the private sector, either through collaboration with industry or through new ventures.

What business skills did you gain from running BoneTec that you applied to launching and running MatRegen?

In both startup ventures, I learned a significant amount. Perhaps one of my most important take-aways was realizing the importance of the management team to the success of the company – that is, a great technology needs a great management team to succeed. Moreover, biotech is expensive and requires significant resources. In Canada, we tend to underfund our startups.

Are there any plans to start another company?

We continue to make discoveries and to engage the private sector in our research. We have one platform technology, in particular, that we are advancing for several different applications. I would like to keep it in the academic environment for as long as we can because we need to fully understand our market and opportunity before raising funds.

We are working closely with MaRS Innovation and one of my former PhD students, Doug Baumann (ChemE 0T4, IBBME PhD 1T0), is leading this effort. In order to succeed, we need to have someone like Doug dedicated to advancing our science toward commercial application, before we even roll the technology out of the university.

What skills do engineers bring to business? And why it important for engineers – and future engineers – to learn about business?

Engineers are creative, dedicated and have an incredible ability to problem solve. Moreover, in the innovation economy of the present and future, engineers have an opportunity, and obligation, to lead new companies. Because they understand the fundamental technology, engineers can figure out where the technology fills an unmet need. Working closely to gain business experience and insights, engineers have and will continue to lead innovative companies.

Is it difficult balancing research, teaching and being an entrepreneur?

Yes. The three skill sets required are very different, and the time required to be successful in each is significant. As a teacher, I work closely with graduate students, teaching them how to think creatively, critically and independently.

As a researcher, I work closely with graduate students, post-docs, technicians and collaborators to answer big questions and solve important problems, but they don't always have commercial applications.

As an entrepreneur, we have to figure out how to make an invention an innovation; we have to figure out how to make products and how to make money. The three are not necessarily connected, and I have to think very differently when we're trying to answer a research question versus a development question.

Do you have advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

While pursuing commercialization of our inventions can be exhausting, it is also exhilarating to think that something we invented in the lab could make a difference to human health. I encourage more engineers to pursue advanced degrees in science/engineering and business so that they can be well equipped to lead new companies. This is critical to Canada's economic future. The opportunity is now. Be bold. Take risks.


Professor Emeritus Joseph C. Paradi (ChemE)

Professor Paradi is the Chair in Information Engineering and Executive Director and founder of U of T’s Centre for Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship (CMTE). As an entrepreneur, he founded or provided guidance to 11 companies. As a professor, he has taught 13 undergraduate courses and five graduate courses on topics including entrepreneurship and technology management. He was recognized with an Entrepreneurship Medal, alongside Professor Andrew Goldenberg, at the Ontario Professional Engineers Awards.

How do you balance being an educator, researcher and entrepreneur?

To start with, if you like what you’re doing, it not hard to balance everything, because you are doing what you want and like to do. It’s not a problem. It’s just a matter of using the 24 hours of the day well. And I like working with people, this [university] is full of fun, energetic people.

Tell us about the companies you founded or helped found.

There are about 11; I lose track. And I’ve got four running right now that are doing very well.

One is called Translucent Technologies Inc., or TTI. And what we do is we manufacture and sell worldwide liquid crystal lens-equipped research goggles.

Another company is Softek Computer Services Inc., and what we do there is run software services for the financial services industry.

Then there is Verapar Kft., and Parcorp Ltd., an investment and consulting firm, where I do angel investing.

Before that, I ran Dataline Inc. for 20 years, and we had international offices and employed hundreds of people. It was a big corporation.

What are the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurs are very different but also very similar. The characteristics for being a successful entrepreneur is just about the right attitude – you don’t know what “no” means, you stand when everybody is down, and you’ve got to have persistence and patience.

How is CMTE faring?

Very well. Today, I have eight graduate students, a post-doc, a research associate, and I have supervised about 50 Master's, a dozen PhD and 180 undergraduate theses. We have eight courses in entrepreneurship university-wide, and I’ve raised about $8.5 million so far.

What do you think is the connection between engineering and business?

Most businesses have engineers starting or running them. Who can run today’s technologies but engineers? I don’t know how you can run an industry without engineers, because we know how to solve problems. We are very popular.

What characteristics do engineers have that can be applied to entrepreneurship?

All of engineering is problem-solving. So to go from that to running a business, it’s not that hard, because you find yourself going, “Wait a minute, I can fix that.” And the next thing you know, you’re in business.

There are a lot of problems that need solving, it’s everywhere you go, and engineers are very good at creating solutions. That’s what we do.

Can you think of the proudest moment in your business career?

Oh, I can think of many. But success is in the way you view it. Something may not be financially successful, but you are still proud of it. I’m proud of a lot of things. One thing that I can think of is when I identified 22 companies that were formed by people who used to work for me. I guess I must have instilled some entrepreneurial seeds in them. To me, that is a sign of success, which had nothing to do with money.

Why is it important to educate Engineering students about entrepreneurship and business?

Well, you know, I learned it at my own expense in the school of hard knocks. It seems to me that it would have been better if I had taken those courses. It’s important to get students to understand that failure happens. Today, I’m going to receive about 18 business plans, so of those, some students will have cover letters that will say, “Sir, I don’t think this is something you would invest in.” But those students will get the same marks as one who says that their business plan is a success.

They say that entrepreneurs succeed one out of seven times, so by educating students, maybe we can cut that down a bit.




Professor Ted Sargent (ECE)

Professor Ted Sargent is the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology, and is the founder of U of T spin-off company InVisage Technologies, Inc. The company uses QuantumFilm – a semiconductor material based on quantum dots, or semiconductor nanoparticles – to build incredibly sensitive detectors for light. InVisage recently won The Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Technology Innovation Award in the Semiconductor category.

How and why did you develop InVisage?

Between 2002 and 2006, graduate students in my group discovered that they could build amazingly sensitive detectors for visible and infrared light simply by coating a semiconductor-containing liquid onto a chip.
  
We realized that we had something very valuable – that we could potentially make image sensors that would be vastly better than what is available today – and felt that it was incumbent on us to advance the technology commercially.

What business skills have you gained from developing and running InVisage?
   
The company is run to be a team of experienced industry executives – a CEO, VP Engineering, and VP R&D, who are established leaders in the realization of image sensors for the mobile handset market. My role as CTO has been to guide the technical direction of the company, build a powerful intellectual property portfolio, and recruit and empower a world-class team.

Can you share the successes your company has had?
   
We have built and proved a platform that promises to revolutionize imaging. The recognition this has entailed has been very rewarding. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, BBC, Scientific American and The Economist have all covered the technology and its promise.

What future plans are there for InVisage? Or are there any plans to start another company?

My entrepreneurial efforts are focused on InVisage. Our upcoming goal is to get the rest of the way to scaled-up manufacture of our products.

What skills do engineers bring to the business world?
   
First and foremost, engineers bring our capacity to tame the physical world to deliver new capabilities to people – the power to speed computation, sense the world around us and influence our environment for the better.

Why is it important for engineers to learn about the business side and about starting their own business? Is it more relevant to learn now than ever?
   
Today, we live in a glorious age for engineering. Never has our power to bring new capabilities to people been greater. Never has the urgency of the challenges we can address – from finding sources of sustainable energy to enabling global communication, to addressing imbalances in the quality of health and education – been more important. Now is the time for engineers to keep turning their innovations into solutions.

Is it difficult to balance being a researcher, professor and entrepreneur?

Engineering researchers are lucky. We suffer no tension among research, teaching and entrepreneurship. All three missions are aligned; each involves bringing the power of our insights and leveraging coordinated teamwork to solve critically important problems.