Canada is flying high

Something wonderful is happening within Canada’s academic institutions. Our universities and community colleges, which were once focused almost exclusively on research and teaching, are now leading the charge on supporting youth entrepreneurship.

A myriad new initiatives are emerging on Canadian campuses, including outreach campaigns, experiential learning opportunities, mentorship programmes and startup accelerators. Increasingly, these initiatives are available not only to current students, but to alumni and even to youth from the broader community, making our academic institutions a more important part of Canada’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.

In Canada, universities conduct a disproportionately large percentage of total research and development when compared to universities in other industrialised nations. However, Canada has struggled to commercialise the results of this academic research. Key stakeholders in Canadian business, government and academia have recognised that improving Canada’s entrepreneurial culture is critical to becoming more globally competitive, and that our academic institutions must be an important part of the solution.

There are a number of ways governments can encourage innovation. One way is through large-scale, centralised policy measures, where the benefits are largely diffused. An example of this is Canada’s tax credit scheme for scientific research and experimental development, which is among the most generous in the world. Another way is by supporting industry-specific initiatives which are effective tools for building cluster activity in industries of strategic importance.

However, in Canada, entrepreneurship tends to be highly regionalised and is best supported at a community level. In Ontario, Canada’s largest province by population and economic output, the provincial government has been making significant investments in regional networks to support entrepreneurship for more than 15 years. In 2001, Ontario created a network of small business centres to help local businesses. In 2009, it took the next step by creating regional innovation centres that help build highly scalable technology-based businesses.

Over this period, the entrepreneurial culture of Canadian youth has seen a significant shift. Like no other generation before them, Canada’s millennials are globally minded and comfortable with the idea that they are likely to change jobs every five years throughout their career. Amid these changes, more youth than ever before are considering entrepreneurship now or in the future. Many millennials are not content with the idea of a traditional job and view entrepreneurship as a tool to build the life they want for themselves and to change the world.

Recognising the need to support young entrepreneurs, last year the Ontario Government announced two programs under the Youth Jobs Strategy that will invest C$25m ($20m) in campus entrepreneurship over two years. The on-campus entrepreneurship activities programme supports universities and colleges in providing activities such as outreach campaigns, educational programmes, and advisory services with volunteer mentors and coaches, while the campus-linked accelerator programme connects campus-based accelerators with local regional innovation centres and the business community. The programmes are managed by the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), an organisation with a long track record of bridging the gap between academia and the private sector. The OCE is now helping to integrate academic institutions into Ontario’s growing entrepreneurship ecosystem and, consequently, is helping to embed entrepreneurship within the culture and mandate of Ontario’s universities and colleges.

Startups have always been an important vehicle for commercialisation at Canadian universities because the receptor capacity of Canadian industry for new technology has traditionally been low. By the mid-2000s, while many technology transfer offices remained focused on protecting and licensing institutional intellectual property, a number of informal groups began coalescing to help support startups within various academic and administrative departments.

As these groups grew to provide more comprehensive services, they began receiving more requests from students, or even youth from the broader community, to help bring to market ideas or technologies that had not originated within the university. While some universities initially shied away from opening their doors, early leaders seized the opportunity to become a focal point for youth entrepreneurship within their region.

Today, a network of 42 universities and colleges in Ontario is undertaking entrepreneurship activities on campuses with support from the on-campus entrepreneurship activities and campus-linked accelerator programmes. So far more than 20 campus-linked accelerators have been established with several more under development. The results to date demonstrate the power of providing support at a regional level, customised to the unique needs of every community, but under a common banner.

In the first half of this year, more than 250,000 young people in Ontario were touched by campus entrepreneurship outreach campaigns. More than 600 entrepreneurship events were held on Ontario campuses with around 21,000 participants. More than 1,200 startups involving 2,700 young entrepreneurs received advice and mentoring on campus, or went through a campus-linked accelerator programme.

In addition to this activity on campuses, over a quarter of these youth-led startups also accessed resources available from other groups within their region or at the provincial level. This type of collaboration between regional stakeholders is critical to giving startups access to the help they need while avoiding duplication. To that end, Ontario has taken the next step by linking its small business enterprise centres, regional innovation centres and academic institutions to form the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs. With more than 100 member organisations working together to help Ontario entrepreneurs, it is one of the largest collaborative networks of entrepreneurship support organisations in the world.

There has never been a better time to start a company on a Canadian university or college campus. Increasingly, our startups are entering global markets early and often find their first customer, partner or investor in a foreign market. Academic institutions are looking to help these “born global” startups by developing collaborative relationships with the best campus-linked entrepreneurship programmes from around the world.

Canada’s universities and colleges are keen to make global linkages in order to share best practices and even help each other’s startups reach global markets. It is a golden age of academic entrepreneurship in Canada and the future looks bright for our young entrepreneurs.