Caplan - Canada at the Summit - (Page 6)

new KNOWLEDGE for a new economy CANADA AT THE SUM MIT CENTENNIAL COLLEGE Such ‘door-opening’ opportunities are often an overlooked benefit for smalland medium-sized firms when they hook up with community colleges. Colleges can serve as conduits to government funding sources, other government departments, agencies and Crown corporations. doors up opening “Community colleges with their focus on practical research or what I call ‘small R&D’ can have more of an impact on startups as well as small and medium size businesses because they can offer affordable, timely and flexible services,” says Chris Beaver, vice-president, REGEN Energy in Toronto. “They offer short to medium term research while university based-research is more long-term.” Beaver speaks from actual experience thanks to the firm’s decision to engage Centennial College as a third-party validator to confirm the performance of EnviroGrid its wireless, energysaving load-management tool. In 2006, before REGEN patented the IP and introduced EnviroGrid to a larger market, the Ontario Centre for Excellence (OCE) arranged a meeting between Centennial College’s Energy Institute at the School of Engineering Technology and Applied Science and REGEN. That led to a $95,000 OCE grant sponsored by the Ontario Power Authority, which enabled REGEN Energy to ask the college’s Energy Institute to assess the EnviroGrid installations at a four-storey, 40,000-squarefoot electrically heated office building in Toronto. “That resulted in a report indicating that our system helped reduce peak demand and over all electrical consumption by 30 per cent,” says Beaver. “The system is based on ‘swarm logic’ algorithms that decentralize decision making so that the system is constantly adjusting and levelling the use of energy without software or operators instead of the more traditional, static ‘command and control’ approach.” Mapping the NOVA SCOTIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE FUTURE GeoNet Technologies Inc. has benefitted from NSCC’s expertise. Established in 1994, it currently has 12 employees. The firm provides climate-change decision support software tools related to the effects rise and fall of sea levels on coastal erosion. The systems are linked into long-term planning models used by all three levels of government as well as firms in insurance and financial services sector. The modelling software helps organizations dealing with sea levels and coastal regions to visualize the impact of climate change as well as the probability of such events. Currently the firm is active in Barbados and India. “The Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG) at the Nova Scotia Community College’s Centre of Geographic Sciences in Middleton, Nova Scotia, provides us the framework within which we can work to attract government sponsorship,” says Mike Pearson, the firm’s director of research and commercialization in Summerside PEI. “The (AGRG) at the Nova Scotia Community College’s Centre of Geographic Sciences in Middleton, Nova Scotia, provides us the framework within which we can work to attract government sponsorship,” Since 2000, Gina Brown, director of Marketing & Communications for Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) estimates that it has received about $24 million in total revenue from its applied research activities including government grants, industry collaboration and earned income. Over that period, its engagements have included various sectors including viticulture (grape cultivation) to help the province’s budding wine industry map the temperatures within the Annapolis Valley to find the most suitable places to grow various types of grapes. Currently there are 11 wineries in the province. Similarly, NSCC’s Applied Geomatics Research Group has also helped Green Power Labs identify the best locations -- the places that enjoy the most sunshine throughout the year -- for placing solar panels. According to Brown, the method of payment from business partners depends on parameters of each individual project, the problems the partners need solved and the deliverables the college has to produce. www.newknowledge.ca http://www.newknowledge.ca

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Caplan - Canada at the Summit