Ontario accelerators dealt funding blow

University-driven accelerators in the Canadian province Ontario have been left surveying the fallout after the withdrawal of a key public funding initiative, BetaKit reported on Friday.
The Ontario government’s Campus Linked Accelerator (CLA) had been open since 2013, providing support to university accelerators including Creative Destruction Lab, Velocity and Digital Media Zone (DMZ) – hosted by Toronto, Waterloo and Ryerson universities respectively.
Sources told BetaKit the scheme’s public funding was pulled in March 2019 with no plans for a replacement.
The move appears to have resulted from budget cuts at provincial entrepreneurship and innovation agency Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), which BetaKit claims have triggered the demise of 21 programs and initiatives, as well as a number of redundancies and the loss of OCE’s chief executive.
CLA was established alongside a sister program, On-Campus Entrepreneurship Activities, which also lost its funding in the cutbacks. The two schemes were initially assigned C$25m ($24.5m at 2013 exchange rates) over two years, with the objective of fostering university entrepreneurship hubs to feed the local ecosystem.
CLA-backed accelerators reportedly received between $460,000 and $730,000 to provide programming and resources, in return for signing up to a model mandating the implementation of match funding and in-kind investment for participants.
The end was apparently in sight following a single-year extension to the scheme by Ontario’s then-Liberal party government in March 2018, which left the path open for its closure upon the new Conservative government’s election later that year.
BetaKit’s sources stressed the initiative was never intended to be permanent. Rather, the aim was to foster a landscape in which CLA-backed accelerators felt empowered to find new, additional sources of funding.
Abdullah Snobar, executive director of Ryerson’s DMZ, told BetaKit: “The CLAs program has been an asset to the growth of Ontario’s innovation ecosystem.
“The recent cuts signal a moment for incubator and accelerator programs in Ontario to become more self-reliant as our innovation economy continues to grow and be recognised on the global stage.”