From climate change to health care, the challenges we face require innovative new coalitions.

Imagine being able to repair damaged organs by printing replacement human tissues. In November, scientists at Toronto’s McEwen Stem Cell Institute announced a partnership to do just that. Working with Aspect Biosystems, a Vancouver biotech company, they’re developing a way to “bioprint” functional tissues that could eventually be implanted into patients to treat liver disease.

It’s a milestone for Medicine by Design, a University of Toronto organization that aims to accelerate progress in regenerative medicine by cross-pollinating ideas among academia, health care institutions, and industry. Using an approach based on a design studio, it brings multidisciplinary teams together to collaborate freely. Medicine by Design has been instrumental in charting the first-ever map of the liver at the cellular level and is now playing a leading role in the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort to map every cell in the human body. 

There’s a growing realization that technical advancements can only go so far when it comes to tackling complex issues like providing health care to an aging population, dealing with climate change, and addressing inequality. The biggest hurdles lie in getting new innovations into widespread use — this is something that only collaboration among government, academia and industry can solve. 

This is how the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine is working to bridge the commercialization gap for cell and gene therapies. Its team focuses on key bottlenecks to accelerate the translation of scientific discovery into marketable products for patients. 

And that’s the approach we’re taking at my own organization, where we launched Mission from MaRS to support ten scaling businesses that we believe can be Canada’s climate champions. These include StormFisher, which turns organic waste into biogas and fertilizers, and Flash Forest, which is on track to use drones to plant one billion trees by 2028. Mission from MaRS has curated teams of experts to troubleshoot the issues these businesses cannot solve alone: outdated regulations, overly risk-averse investors or cumbersome government procurement processes. With more than 50 industry experts from such organizations as OMERS, Maple Leaf Foods, RBC, KPMG, and Shopify, the coalitions are working to clear stumbling blocks from the cleantech companies’ routes to market so they can start mitigating climate change at scale.     

Will it work? The early signs are promising. In December, Mission from MaRS signed an accelerated procurement process with the City of Toronto, which will support Canadian innovation and help Canada’s largest city reach its net-zero targets. 

Canada also has a solid track record of creating winning partnerships to build on. MaRS IAF, which started as an experiment in combining government seed funding with a management team of venture capitalists, has become one of Canada’s most active seed-stage investment funds. Since 2008, it has supported 175 ventures, leading to $1.7 billion in follow-on funding and more than 5,500 new jobs. MaRS IAF combines a government mandate with a private-sector mindset and is housed in a non-profit organization. That unique perspective has helped it nurture such standout companies as Mindbridge, ACTO, and Nicoya. Based on that success, this January it spun out Graphite Ventures, a new $100-million investment fund that will be able to write even bigger cheques to support promising ventures. 

One of the unfortunate side effects of tech’s growth in recent years has been a myopic focus on individual founders with big egos — successful and brilliant in their own right, but imperfect when it comes to creating a repeatable playbook. As the innovation economy matures, it’s clear that ecosystems are a far better foundation and catalyst from which to create repeatable success. Building coalitions and forging partnerships may lack the glamour of playing by your own rules, but it is more effective at creating lasting change. Truly impactful innovation is a team sport. 

This article was supported by MaRS Discovery District.

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The first generation of quantum devices, among them lasers and semiconductor-based transistors, brought on a technological revolution in the early 2000s and transformed society forever.

The first generation of quantum devices, among them lasers and semiconductor-based transistors, brought on a technological revolution in the early 2000s and transformed society forever. Today, a new generation of quantum technology is emerging that will help make the world an even safer, faster, and more productive place.

New quantum sensors will be among the first quantum technologies to market. Their precision and sensitivity will help peer into the tiniest features of the world more deeply than anything before. These sensing technologies will hold the promise of helping to solve disease, will build resilience against cyber attacks, and help secure the Internet of Things.

Under the National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Internet of Things: Quantum Sensors Challenge program, top quantum scientists at the NRC and the University of Waterloo (uWaterloo) are collaborating to develop such disruptive sensors and make them a reality. This means getting them out of the lab and into the field for testing, and eventually adapting them for daily use.

The joint research teams are harnessing the extreme sensitivity of quantum systems to make these super-delicate, fragile sensors robust and compact — and build them into chips to be used in all our smart devices.

Many of these collaborative projects will create enabling technologies, such as new methods for transporting information that is encoded in photons into solid-state spins. This will help enable delicate networks of quantum sensors and other next-generation quantum applications.

The collaboration brings together the NRC’s quantum photonics talent and facilities for building state-of-the-art integrated optics with the researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and students of the uWaterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.  

Canadians will begin seeing these sensors in action in the very near future. In health care, they might drive new imaging capabilities for studying eye disorders or measuring brain activity. On the road or the battlefield, LiDAR systems, like those in self-driving vehicles, will use photons to measure position and velocity more precisely with less light needed. And in mining, sensors could detect new underground mineral deposits.

Together, our researchers will engineer the next-generation quantum sensors.

This article was supported by the National Research Council of Canada.

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The University of Calgary’s Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking is bridging the gap between students and the new economy nationwide.

One of the biggest issues that innovation ventures face is a lack of easy accessibility to skilled talent. Establishing firm connections with talented individuals opens doors for collaboration, economic development, and continued prosperity for Canada. 

That’s why the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking offers many immersive talent experiences and workshops along with its social innovation and entrepreneurship training programs. They instill students from all disciplines with strong collaboration and problem-solving skills, resiliency, and a forward-thinking mindset that’s ready to grow and affect change to create a better future. 

The Hunter Hub creates, inspires, and supports future changemakers through its diverse curriculum, extracurricular, and experiential learning activities and programs. They build innovation initiatives across campus and beyond. They understand the new economy’s needs, which is why they strive to build a community of interdisciplinary innovators within the university while connecting with talent outside it. 

Honing future-ready skills

A new national initiative, Experience Ventures, is geared toward doing just that by giving students the chance to make an impact alongside real-world innovators. For aspiring student changemakers, these opportunities help to demystify and increase accessibility to the innovation community nationwide. 

Led by the Hunter Hub, Experience Ventures is a national initiative that has partnerships with eight other top Canadian universities so far. Having just launched in July, it’s had over 2,000 students participate in a wildly successful pilot year. 

“Our students are matched with early-stage startups and social ventures. Together they work to solve a defined real-world problem and build a solution,” says Keri Damen, the Executive Director of the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking. “Plus, students are paid for their experience, eradicating any potential financial barriers and increasing access to innovation opportunities from all backgrounds.”

With flexible working models, participants have a certain number of hours they must fulfill, and projects can be tackled as individuals or in teams. Students can apply what they’re learning in the classroom while integrating into local innovation ecosystems and building their networks.

Our students are matched with early-stage startups and social ventures. Together they work to solve a defi ned realworld problem and build a solution.

Advance your career

“We want to keep our brightest student innovators in our local communities supporting startups,” Keri adds. “Our students are getting hired by these ventures after the program ends.” Plus, the initiative was specially designed to reach rural and underrepresented communities, ensuring that the future of innovation is diverse in thought and representation by being accessible to everyone. 

Experience Ventures opportunities are open to students from 14 faculties at UCalgary and its partner universities — encouraging cross-discipline team building and mutual respect. Everyone gains experience in transferrable skills that will be useful in any industry, including risk management, collaboration, and the ability to spot opportunities. 

The university is actively looking for more partnerships to make this program available to more students. “The University of Calgary is on a very exciting trajectory in innovation,” Keri explains. Offering initiatives like Experience Ventures is why the school ranks number one for research-based startups in Canada amongst university institutions.

Building Canada’s innovation economy

The University of Calgary is also the youngest school to be ranked as one of the top five research universities in the country. The institution believes that research forms the necessary foundation for innovation and economic development. Not only are they finding that more students are going into innovation, researchers are now also increasingly considering the real-world impact their research might have. This crossover into entrepreneurship ensures that the school’s innovation ecosystem will continue to grow and thrive.

Experience Ventures gives students the sense of community that’s been lacking during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through their upcoming Experience Ventures National Hackathon. Collaborating with interdisciplinary teams, participants will work with industry experts to solve a problem — this one being wellness. Students will build networks, test solutions, and learn how to strategize. The top teams compete at a national competition for $5,000 worth of cash prizes. 

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John Luszczek

Business Opportunities Leader, Ericsson Ottawa

The Ericsson-Carleton University Strategic Partnership for Research, Talent Development, and Leadership in Wireless Networks is a strategic collaboration amplifying the strengths of industry and academia.

The best partnerships are ones where each partner amplifies the strengths of the other, bringing out the best in each other and adding up to more than the sum of their parts. That’s certainly the case with the Ericsson-Carleton University Partnership for Research and Leadership in Wireless Networks, which has been going strong for two years now, with exciting results. The innovative collaboration shows the amazing things that can happen when industry and academia work together.

The benefits of collaboration 

The Ericsson-Carleton University Partnership for Research and Leadership in Wireless Networks is a collaborative effort to drive innovation, train skilled workers, and build more reliable, secure technology for the future of 5G wireless communications. 

“Ericsson Ottawa is a strategic research and development site for Ericsson in North America. We are the largest Ericsson 5G R&D centre in North America,” says John Luszczek, Business Opportunities Leader at Ericsson Ottawa. “Carleton University has an excellent academic program, including engineering and computer sciences, and is known as a leader in research. With our collaboration, we’re delivering hands-on experiential learning to help build student skills so they’re ready to meet industry needs as well as defining industry challenges so we can solve them through academic research. This is a perfect equation of having a ‘one plus one equals three’ collaboration, where we’re really seeing benefits that singularly wouldn’t have as much impact as the addition of the two.” 

It’s an innovative step that aims to attract top-notch students. The idea is to find the best of the best both nationally and internationally, and to attract them here and bring them into close contact and collaboration with Ericsson.

Focusing on talent development and research 

The strategic collaboration consists of research projects, the Ericsson Fellowship program, the 5G Wireless Laboratory, the development of a 5G Networks course, and the Ericsson Research Chair. 

John Lambadaris is the Chancellor’s Professor and Ericsson Chair in 5G Wireless Research at Carleton University. He has been active in the field for over 25 years and has collaborated extensively with the high-tech industry. “My area of research is performance analysis of data and communication networks,” he says. “My research started in areas like network traffic modelling and performance analysis of architecture for next-generation internet. These days I’m working in cloud computing, network visualization, big data, and 5G wireless networks.”

Lambadaris has collaborated with the team at Ericsson Ottawa for a decade, and is excited about their fruitful partnership. He notes that the partnership’s primary goals are advanced research and training highly-qualified personnel. “We introduced the Fellowship program for that second reason,” he says. “It’s an innovative step that aims to attract top-notch students. The idea is to find the best of the best both nationally and internationally, and to attract them here and bring them into close contact and collaboration with Ericsson.”

“This partnership is impacting society overall because we’re really looking at driving innovation in Canada,” says Luszczek. “We’re building a skilled workforce through our academic programs and research, and at the end of this we’ll be able to take advantage of this technology we’ve developed for the future in mobile communication solutions.”

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Jamie Bakos

President & CEO, Titan

Dr. Robin Smith

Academic Chair, SLICE, School of Natural Resources & Built Environment and School of Mining, Energy, & Manufacturing

Saskatchewan Polytechnic’s innovative new Sustainability-Led Integrated Centres of Excellence (SLICE) is empowering a better Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan Polytechnic (Sask Polytech) engages in applied research, drawing on faculty expertise to support innovation by employers and providing students the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. The institution’s new Sustainability-Led Integrated Centre of Excellence (SLICE) is an industry-centric, solution-oriented development and deployment centre that’s bringing sustainable development to Saskatchewan and Canada through local technology solutions with global application potential.

Turning waste into something useful 

“SLICE is a new Sask Polytech applied research centre advancing sustainable resource management with a full life-cycle lens approach,” says Dr. Robin Smith, Academic Chair of Applied Research Operations at SLICE. “Our focus is on key sectors of Saskatchewan’s economy including energy resources, manufacturing, agriculture, and forestry. SLICE is really about delivering solutions to applied research partners in support of a circular, bio-based economy.” 

The circular economy prioritizes reusing, recycling, and upcycling of materials and resources to minimize waste and promote sustainability, and two of SLICE’s recent projects highlight innovations in the field.

The ecological soil reclamation project was undertaken after Sask Polytech was approached by Andrew Carpenter, a freelance Environmental Consultant and President of Reclaimit, a company focused on forest and land restoration.

“I was doing a soil reclamation project up in Northern Saskatchewan and it failed,” says Carpenter. “I realized that I’m not a researcher — I’m a practitioner. I needed some horsepower from the research end.”

Carpenter went looking for support and came upon Sask Polytech. Together, they’ve been exploring how to restore soil using biochar, a charcoal produced by the thermal decomposition of biomass. 

“Biochar is made from repurposed waste, so we’re taking a waste product that would end up in a landfill and repurposing it into solid carbon, which is now considered sequestered carbon, so we’re using sequestered carbon to help repair the soil,” says Carpenter. “It’s really cool.”

One of the benefits of partnering with SLICE is that it’s a single-entry point to multiple areas of expertise at Sask Polytech. Sustainability issues are complex and we recognize that through our collaborative approach.

Supporting a bio-based circular economy

Another exciting project being undertaken by SLICE is the Waste Not, Want Not project, which aims to develop a biocarbon masterbatch, a solid additive used to impart colour and other properties to plastics, that could replace traditional petroleum-based carbon black. This project is with Titan Clean Energy Projects.

“We’re working with Sask Polytech and looking at how we can use materials that might be considered waste from another segment of the economy to improve processes and cycle back into the system,” says Jamie Bakos, President and CEO of Titan. “In this case, we’re looking at developing a product that could assist in making compostable bioplastics. We have the potential to export this material worldwide.”

SLICE’s collaborative, integrated, transdisciplinary approach is focused on understanding the relationships required to address complex issues related to sustainability. “Our partners have access to exceptional facilities, faculty expertise, and an amazing pool of student talent,” says Smith. “One of the benefits of partnering with SLICE is that it’s a single-entry point to multiple areas of expertise at Sask Polytech. Sustainability issues are complex and we recognize that through our collaborative approach.”

The first step to learning what Sask Polytech and its applied research team of expert faculty can do for your business is reach out. “All it takes is a phone call or an email to get started,” says Dr. Susan Blum, associate Vice-President, Applied Research and Innovation. “We’ll work with you — whether you’re just starting out or in a large organization — to determine what you need to accomplish and how we can help you get there.”

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Dr. Iosif-Viorel (Vio) Onut

Co-Director, uOttawa IBM Cyber Range & Senior Manager, IBM

The University of Ottawa and IBM have partnered up to launch a Cyber Range.

There’s a major cybersecurity skills gap in Canada. The data varies, but reports show roughly three to four million unfilled jobs in that field. Trained cybersecurity professionals are desperately needed to fill the void.

The forthcoming Cyber Range, located within the University of Ottawa’s Cyber Hub on the 5th floor of the STEM Complex, is a multi-year partnership between the University of Ottawa (uOttawa) and IBM Canada and is a giant step in the right direction. The Cyber Range will provide a full sensory-immersive and interactive training setting for visitors to experience true-to-life cyber response scenarios, in a full-scale security operations center (SOC) based on a fusion team model. The Cyber Range will further enable state-of-the-art research and training in cybersecurity and cybersafety while facilitating collaboration between government, industry, and academia. 

A unique collaboration 

The uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range will be the first of its kind in Canada and is being built with a $27 million investment by uOttawa and IBM. This latest partnership comes after years of fruitful collaboration between uOttawa and IBM

“We have a long history with IBM,” says Dr. Guy-Vincent Jourdan, Co-Director of the uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range and a Professor in uOttawa’s Faculty of Engineering. “IBM has been working with several of us at uOttawa, my team in particular, for the past 13 years.” 

Dr. Jourdan’s work with IBM is research focused, highlighting uOttawa’s position among the top 10 research universities in Canada. The University has long promoted dynamic research collaborations and it has leveraged Ottawa’s government laboratories, industry, and policymakers. Its latest partnership with IBM will continue to facilitate these connections.

“It felt natural for us to partner with uOttawa to bring the Cyber Range training to the university landscape,” says Dr. Vio Onut, Co-Director of the uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range and a Senior Manager at IBM. “We wish to accomplish two things: to start training students on cybersecurity and to enhance the scenarios that we have, because whenever you have a joint effort between two complementary partners from industry and academia, you always come up with better results.” 

We wish to accomplish two things: to start training students on cybersecurity and to enhance the scenarios that we have, because whenever you have a joint eff ort between two complementary partners from industry and academia, you always come up with better results.

From training to professional development 

The new Cyber Range will be a fully immersive and experiential-based facility that will enable state-of-the-art research and training in cybersecurity and cybersafety. Students, working professionals from government or industry, and other partners and clients will have the opportunity to use the Cyber Range on campus to learn, train, and upskill techniques, methods, and approaches in a world-class environment. The Cyber Range activities and operations are supported by simulation rooms, a broadcast room, a command room, and multi-purpose space for hosting visitors. 

The relationship between government, industry, and academia is essential. “Without this intersection, we’re basically spinning our wheels,” says Dr. Jourdan. “For us, it’s critical to be connected to industry and government so that our research can be oriented toward real problems that they experience.”

The Cyber Range will also create immense opportunities for interdisciplinary activities in training and research, bringing together numerous faculties and disciplines across uOttawa. “An enterprise-wide cybersecurity attack is not only handled by the technical team. Of course, there’s an incident response team that has an IT focus, but there are other important functions of the business that are also involved, including public relations, communications, human resources, legal, privacy, line of business, and more,” says Dr. Onut. All of these teams must work together as a fusion team to ensure a quick and efficient business response to preserve customer loyalty and trust, protect critical data, and maintain business operations.

The Cyber Range will help fill the training and skills gap in cybersecurity in Canada, and will offer training in both official languages. It will be operated collaboratively by uOttawa and IBM. 

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Could food “waste” be used in natural beauty products? What are the opportunities for horticulture in deep space exploration? What secrets does the genome hold for the future of farming? As industry becomes increasingly concerned with sustainable development, Loyalist College is working to answer these questions through applied research in the bioeconomy.

Over the last five years, Loyalist College has transformed itself into a destination for applied research, rooted in strong relationships with community and industry partners. Located in Belleville, Ont., between major producer markets in Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, the College has aligned its programming with the evolution of the local agriculture and manufacturing sectors as they pursue renewable resourcing — from vertical farming and sustainable building supplies to circular food economics and new cosmetic formulations.

“At Loyalist College, we are deeply connected to our industry and community partners and know that we have an important role to play in driving regional economic growth and development,” said Dr. Ann Marie Vaughan, President and CEO of Loyalist College. “The innovative partnerships and synergies we are developing across natural products and the bioeconomy will benefit regional employers while also providing Loyalist students with unparalleled work-integrated learning opportunities. It has been truly remarkable to see the many ways in which our students and employees are lending their talents to our growing network of partners and demonstrating how being small gives us the power to do big things.” 

Tapping into the regional innovation network

Loyalist College’s Applied Research and Innovation Office has launched a series of partnerships to bring new sustainable products and processes to market — driving a new generation of social and economic development in the process.

Case in point: Canadian natural beauty company Afiya Beauty hoped to address one of its customer’s top requests — an all-natural product that helps fade skin discolouration. Traditionally, skin care companies rely on harsh de-pigmenting agents to treat dark spots. Afiya worked with Loyalist College and GreenCentre Canada, dynamic partners in applied research and industry, for formulation expertise. Afiya is now testing and formulating new products to create a de-pigmenting cream that meets customer demands and matches its all-natural ethos.

At Loyalist College, we are deeply connected to our industry and community partners and know that we have an important role to play in driving regional economic growth and development.

Leveraging each other’s expertise

With its mission to support sustainable chemistry and advanced material startups, GreenCentre Canada is the perfect ally for the College. Together, their focus is offering support for small- and medium-sized enterprises and multinationals who wish to transform their products, processes, and services. 

“The idea is to enhance the service offerings that Loyalist College and GreenCentre have to support companies that are developing new sustainable technologies, specifically in the bioproducts sector,” says Fatme Dahcheh, GreenCentre Canada’s Director of Business Development.

Alongside GreenCentre Canada, Loyalist College’s Centre for Natural Products and Medical Cannabis have used GreenCentre Canada’s CONNECT program to help seven companies grow and develop their technologies and products.

“Loyalist College has been fantastic to work with,” says Dahcheh. “Both organizations want to support innovative companies who are developing sustainable technologies, so we’re able to really leverage each other’s expertise and funding opportunities.”

Launching big ideas locally and beyond

Nowhere is this opportunity to connect local strengths with global challenges more evident than in Loyalist’s innovative new partnership with Ontario Genomics and Canadore College, which will mobilize DNA information to create advances in natural product development and research.

“Loyalist College is a very avant-garde college,” says Bettina Hamelin, President and CEO of Ontario Genomics. “We’ve been working with Loyalist and Canadore to unify genomics-based applied research, education, and training across the province. Loyalist is really working at the forefront of these emerging and game-changing technologies.”

As with all the College’s applied research partnerships, the goal is to help drive industry evolution while providing students with exceptional work-integrated learning experiences. 

Students in programs including Culinary Skills and Management, Cannabis Applied Science, Horticulture, and more can help solve real-world problems that small businesses are grappling with.

At the intersection of industry demand and research potential, these “local to global” partnerships represent the key to how Loyalist College is unlocking the future of Canada’s bioeconomy. 

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Tracy Fleming

Advanced Solutions, Avaya

The link between company and customer is built on experiences. It might be products and services that bring people to engage with a company in the first place, but it’s the quality of the interaction that retains customers, or loses them. Wherever and whenever that point of contact occurs, there’s a need to deliver an experience that’s welcoming, useful, appropriate, and enjoyable. With more than seven billion people on this planet, however, each with their own needs and desires, it’s simply impossible to curate a single experience that will suit them all. What one customer loves, another will hate.

And that really matters. People are no longer willing to accept friction in their interactions with companies. They know that there’s a better way and they expect it. The data is quite clear that customers are more than willing to walk away from a company after a bad experience. But how can you consistently create a good one for an audience with infinite variety?

The augmented human experience

In today’s era of cloud AI, the golden prize of a truly personalized experience for each customer is finally within reach. The answer is not, however, replacing agents with computers. Instead, we can augment the capabilities of the agents with AI, blending the human and the digital to create a seamlessly personal experience. “The human piece of this isn’t going away,” says Tracy Fleming, Practice Leader for AI at Avaya, a multinational technology company that specializes in cloud communications and workstream collaboration solutions. “Human interaction is still the gold standard. What you’re seeing is AI enabling that human to provide a better experience.”

Artificial intelligence is by no means a new area of exploration within the customer experience field, but as the capabilities of modern AI continue to grow exponentially, the implementation is taking on a whole new character. “The cloud is really the accelerator for the applied use of AI,” says Fleming. “It allows the technology to be applied seamlessly across an entire business model, and so we’re certainly seeing it being deployed in a much broader range of applications. But the core capabilities in this space have been executed in the Avaya world for years.”

Human interaction is still the gold standard. What you’re seeing is AI enabling that human to provide a better experience.

The angel on the shoulder

One of the major new developments is the ever-increasing speed and flexibility with which these AI solutions can be integrated into ongoing interactions. Gone is the time of AI systems facilitating the start of an interaction and then analyzing it afterwards. Whereas it used to be the norm for something like five percent of daily calls to be thoroughly analyzed after hours, now one hundred percent of calls can be analyzed as they’re happening.

AI still plays an integral role in directing the right customer to the right agent, not only for their needs, but also for their personality, demographics, and mood. But then it stays on the line. “What’s been really interesting due to the amount of computing and storage in the cloud today is the way we can provide outcome and input to agents in real time,” says Fleming. “We can have the AI acting as the front door concierge and also sitting on the shoulder of the agent as they’re talking. The AI hears what the customer is saying, finds the relevant data, and then renders it out to the agent on the fly. And it can prompt the agent before the call is over if they forget something, so you never have these incomplete experiences.”

The end result is an experience that is even more human. This is the real arc of the AI transformation, as it allows us to rehumanize our interactions. After decades of digitization and depersonalization, technology is building us a bridge back to genuine human connection.

Let’s see how your company scores on the total experience self-assessment?

There’s nothing artificial about an experience

When implemented properly to build dynamic experiences, artificial intelligence creates an environment where the humanity of both the agent and the customer is able to shine. The Avaya Experience Builders ecosystem leverages all the power of this technology to customize customization itself, so that the experience can be refined down to the essential of the business and then broadened again to fit the rich diversity of its customers. When done right, the most diligent AI experience work renders itself almost invisible.

“When a customer gets off a call thinking that, for 10 minutes, they were the only thing in that person’s world, they may not think to themselves, that was an incredible use of artificial intelligence,” says Fleming. “I would argue that’s the point. I think artificial intelligence is at its best when you don’t know it’s there.”

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Anne Toner Fung

CEO, Innovation Guelph

A long-time leader in cleantech and sustainability, Guelph is transitioning to the circular economy. Here’s how Innovation Guelph is supporting that transition.

Cleantech innovation and sustainability are nothing new to the City of Guelph. “Guelph has always been a bit of a natural centre for cleantech activity,” says Anne Toner Fung, CEO, Innovation Guelph, a regional business incubator that helps to accelerate start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Guelph was one of the first North American Cities to develop a community energy plan (CEP) and there has long been a cluster of companies in the Guelph Wellington area that fall into the cleantech sector. They range from wastewater management firms to water quality companies to solar panel manufacturers.

More recently Guelph has seen increased activity around the circular economy – an economic model that aims to transform the linear “take, make, waste” paradigm to the circular one of “reduce, reuse, recycle” and further to include “reimagine and redesign.”

It started about three years ago at the intersection of the food sector and sustainability with a Smart Cities project to create a circular regional food economy in Guelph-Wellington. This project has now expanded to include broader environmental issues. “It’s no longer just around food waste and access to food, but sustainability and cleantech in general and it’s now tied to the post-COVID green economic recovery,” says Toner Fung.

Innovation Guelph offers funding, mentorship and education programs

Innovation Guelph has been supporting the cleantech ecosystem in and around Guelph for the past decade through funding, mentorship, and education programs. These programs range from supporting women-led businesses, to start-up mentorship, to project-based programs for more established SMEs.

As the city and county further embrace the circular economy, Innovation Guelph is expanding its programs to do likewise. Building on its experience and expertise as one of the program delivery partners for the Smart Cities “Our Food Future” initiative, Innovation Guelph is also contributing to its next stage: COIL (Circular Opportunities Innovation Launchpad). COIL is an innovation platform and activation network dedicated to advancing circularity in businesses and communities. Through COIL programs, companies have the opportunity to create, prove, and scale transformative solutions. “The vision for this is a user-centred open innovation eco-system which fosters the development of new businesses and collaborations that support regional circular economy,” says Christopher Coghlan, Program Manager, Circular Economy iHub & COIL Accelerators, at Innovation Guelph. One of COIL’s key programs, the Activate Circular Accelerator, for example, focuses on funding and accelerating innovative circular economy businesses working in the nexus of the food and environment sectors.   

Gaining momentum and attracting international attention

Both within Innovation Guelph and around the City of Guelph, the circular economy is gaining traction with broader initiatives taking place. “We’ve managed to garner the attention of some international players,” says Toner Fung. “One of the entities that provided curriculum for the Activate Circular Accelerator program was the University of Exeter in England, which is affiliated with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a global group of thought leaders on the circular economy, so I’d say the momentum is fairly significant and we’re just a piece of it,” says Toner Fung.

In support of COIL, Innovation Guelph has engaged with circular economy accelerators and investment firms around the world, such as Closed Loop Partners in New York City, Tondo in Milan, and Circular Valley in Germany. “The work being done here is certainly attracting interest in organizations that are working in this space worldwide,” adds Coghlan.

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Since the very first modern computer appeared in office, we’ve all been asking, “Do we still need all this paper?” It’s a harder question than it seems. If we want to limit the waste, the ecological impact, and the productivity drain of paper, we need to step back and ask ourselves what it is that keeps drawing people to the printout. We need solutions that ease the transition to an enhanced digital workflow while understanding real-world business needs.

The reality of paper

The invention of paper ushered in a never-before-seen age of literacy and education. It’s a cheap, portable, accessible, and lasting vessel for information. Those qualities still drive its use today. But, in an era where workers are spread across the globe, handing a sheet of paper to a colleague is rarely convenient. This is a world where information may as well not exist if it can’t be accessed from your phone. This is a moment when costs are measured not only in dollars, but in time and tons of carbon.

The advantages of going paperless are clear. The Association for Intelligent Information Management has reported that 84 percent of organizations that undertook paper-free projects achieved payback in less than 18 months. But that value is only realized when the undeniable power of print is preserved through this transition.

Canon has spent decades perfecting the philosophy and the practical reality of how people and businesses create, preserve, use, and share information. They’ve leveraged this experience and insight into the creation of new suites of tools that aren’t just paper replacements, but reinventions of the business information ecosystem. And, critically, these systems are informed by a deep understanding of what businesses and employees want and need.

A complete digital transformation

According to Gartner, every time an employee touches a piece of paper, it costs the company $20. Gartner further estimates that the average employee loses almost four weeks of productivity every year searching for lost and misfiled documents. There’s real money and time to be saved here.

But, when the office is a maze of filing cabinets, and home work spaces are chaotic mountains of paperwork organized only by memory and hope, the gap to a structured digital solution may seem unbridgeable. Going paperless is a process, not an event.

Canon’s flagship information management solutions provide an answer to this problem. And cutting-edge OCR, intelligent document fingerprinting, and high-accuracy indexing provide a seamless on-ramp for any document into the digital workflow the moment it’s needed.

These solutions provide workers with the ability to capture, archive, retrieve, edit, and process data at any point in the workflow quickly and securely. They turn every document into a transactable work space with a memory of its own, providing every bit of the power and flexibility of a paper and a pen while maintaining the accessibility and security of cloud-based collaboration.

And, just as importantly, the new digital paradigm to which these documents are transitioned, to has been crafted from the ground up for efficiency. After all, little is gained by replacing a stack of marked-up paper with a tangled email inbox housing dozens of threads with hundreds of versioned documents. A comprehensive solution gently and seamlessly tames this mess into a cohesively streamlined whole.

So, do we still need all this paper? Not necessarily, but we do need a knowledgeable and thoughtful guide to lead us away from it. We need a voice that is intimately familiar with the way businesses work and is unafraid to imagine ways they could work better. Reaping the benefits of the paperless transition requires not a leap, but a series of well-informed steps along a carefully crafted path, a path paved by companies like Canon.

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