By Knowlton Thomas

The AQT’s ninth Big Bang ICT Sales & Marketing Forum held in May was attended by 200 leaders and partners from the technology industry. Major topics of discussion at the event were the Internet, the Web, and mobility—and how these three intertwined game changers have forced companies to implement new customer acquisition strategies. These new business models have a direct impact on human resources, the role of management teams, and even corporate structure.

Ally Motz of SiriusDecisions gave a presentation on the results of a recent B2B marketing survey highlighted this rapidly changing landscape: 58 percent of prospects originated from the web and this is estimated to rise to 71% by 2015, and companies that use social media generate 30 percent more information requests. The research also found that elements of mobility should be incorporated into the business immediately.

Entrepreneur Denis Lavallée called a number of industry practices into question. He called for a shift in the corporate structure that would focus all departments on the customer experience. He also noted that we should now be focussing on the five Ps of marketing, with Participation (conversation, community, collaboration, etc.) joining the already familiar Product, Price, Promotion, and Placement.

Nicolas Arsenault, CEO of Inovacom, spoke of mobility’s increasing influence, particularly with the constantly connected Generation Y. He encouraged participants to integrate mobility into their preferred media.

Reposted from Techvibes Media

Knowlton Thomas is the Associate Editor of Techvibes Media. He is also the Web Editor of The Other Press, a weekly newspaper, and a regular columnist for them as well.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers provide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Pam Banks

Earlier this week, we announced the competing companies –  Carmel Vision, Induce Biologics, Isobarex and Rivalries Corporation – that will pitch to the expert panel for a chance to be crowned the Star Innovator of Idol III.

The winning company will be the recipient of a suite of prizes valued over $40,000 from the kind contribution of the prize sponsors.

“Our finalists have invested many hundreds of hours in sweat equity to get to this annual grand finale of our Growing Your Business breakfast series,” said RIC`s Entrepreneur-in-residence, James Sbrolla. “They are all talented and committed star innovators who benefit from prize sponsors like Bereskin Parr, C Worthy, Intelligent Office, Gowlings, Marketing Pad, Meyer Norris Penny, RBC, and Sustained-Media.”

June 15^th`s Idol III is shaping up to be an extraordinary event, we have had to move to a bigger venue to accommodate a large crowd and we are excited to be growing so exponentially and being recognized by our peers and supporters. Mayor McCallion highlighted the importance of great platforms like Idol for start-up companies to connect with investors and to encourage other individuals with entrepreneurial aspirations.

We are also looking forward to past winners – Temporal Power and RealTech – providing an update of where being an Innovator Idol winner has taken them.

June 15^th’s Idol is an event you won’t want to miss – Click here to register today – we hope to see you there!

Pam Banks is the Executive Director for RIC Centre.  RIC Centre helps new entrepreneurs and seasoned business people take the next great idea to market in the field of advanced manufacturing, aerospace, life sciences and emerging technology.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Saadia Muzaffar

Yesterday, you were introduced two of the four panelist for Innovator Idol – taking place on June 15^th . The remaining two panelist that will listen to the pitches and provide their commentary are:

Jan Holland is a prolific investor with a career that spans over 25 years in Capital Markets, Corporate Governance and Risk Management. Jan is a Chartered Accountant and graduate of the Directors Education Program at Rotman School of Business, U of T.

Jan is currently a Founding Partner and Managing Director of Willowgrove Hill DHA/EPA Omega-3 Premium Pork, a functional food business established in 2008. He is also a Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tricycle Asset Management, a Commodity Pool Operator established in 2000.

Since 1986, Jan has overseen several family holding companies in the manufacturing, investment banking and real estate sectors.

Probal Lala is a founding executive of About Communications a national provider of voice, data and internet communications solutions to small to medium-sized businesses.

An accomplished Senior Telecommunications Executive with over 20 years of broad Industry experience , Probal has been retained to provide executive leadership to a variety of companies ranging from privately held High Tech Start-ups to publically traded telecommunications firms.

A passionate believer in the role of entrepreneurs as well as youth in our economy, Probal spends much of his spare time on the promotion and development of young leaders and entrepreneurs.

He is a founding member of the Toronto based Maple Leaf Angels organization and he currently sits on the board of Youth-In-Motion, a national not-for-profit organization.

Join us for Innovator Idol III. Click here to register today.

Saadia is the Operations Coordinator at RIC Centre, responsible for building and execution of activities that fulfill RIC’s mandate. She has several years of relationship management, corporate communications and operations experience mainly from the financial services industry.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

This year’s Innovator Idol – taking place on June 15^th – will host four exciting and experienced panelists ready to take on pitches of the finalists!  There is a diverse range of expertise on the panel:

Paul Morgan, the Managing Director for mid-market corporate finance at RBC Royal Bank has 10 years of experience in the field, advising clients on mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, buyouts, raising capital and succession planning.  He is a Chartered Accountant and has been given the corporate finance specialist designation from the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Benj Gallander is best known for his well-read column in The Globe & Mail titled The Contra Guys.  He is a regular guest on the Business News Network and has authored several publications, including The Canadian Small Business Survival Guide, The Uncommon Investor, and The Contrarian Investor’s 13. Benj is the president of the Contra the Heard Investment Letter, which has a 10-year annualized return of 19.6%.

Click here to register today.

Saadia is the Operations Coordinator at RIC Centre, responsible for building and execution of activities that fulfill RIC’s mandate. She has several years of relationship management, corporate communications and operations experience mainly from the financial services industry.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Cheryl Lindsay

RIC Centre is pleased to announce that it has selected four innovative companies from a large pool of applicants for this year’s Innovator Idol III. And the finalists are:

Carmel Vision
Carmel Vision (CV) is a Toronto based software & hardware development company focused on delivering fresh and innovative solutions to address information overload.   CV was founded in 2004 and has an existing user base of 600 customers. The company’s goal is to offer technologically superior, yet affordable products that let users regain control of their data saving time wasted on searching and organizing.

Induce Biologics Inc.
Induce Biologics is a regenerative medicine company focused on developing devices combining growth factors and biomaterials to induce the body to regenerate itself – specializing in regenerative medicine, recombinant growth factor and osteogenesis.

Isobarex
Established in 2008, Isobarex develops innovative technologies enhancing the detection of radiotracers and expanding their applications in biomedical research and nuclear safety and security. The technology allows measuring important radiotracers with unprecedentedly low limits of detection.

Rivalries Corporation
By combining some of the traditional plastic processing technology with its modified intrusion and insert intrusion technology, Rivalries Corporation has been successful in developing a sample product offering that creates a cost-effective, sustainable, and marketable final product. Rivalries technology allows one to take a waste stream and convert it into a useful set of products that are durable, waterproof, insect- and rot-resistant, non-toxic, and cost-effective.

Click to learn more about Innovator Idol III.  It takes place on June 15^th, 2011 from 8:30AM-11:00AM at the Noel Ryan Auditorium (301 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W., Mississauga). Registration for the third annual Innovator Idol is now open. Seating is limited! Register today.

Cheryl Lindsay is an undergrad student and the University of Toronto, Mississauga.  She is currently enrolled in the CCIT program pursuing a specialist in Digital Enterprise Management.  Cheryl is a student intern with the RIC Centre acting as Assisting Communications Officer.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Jasmeet Duggal

This week’s blog series will be highlighting all things Idol, including the finalists, members of the expert panel, and the list of prizes to be awarded to the Star Innovator.

 RIC Centre is ending this season’s Growing Your Business with its grand finale, Innovator Idol III taking place on June 15^th, 2011 from 8:30AM-11:00AM at the Noel Ryan Auditorium (301 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W., Mississauga).

Idol is a showcase of innovative companies that will pitch for a chance to win $40,000 in prizes. The audience will have an opportunity to hear the high-profile panel of judges weighs in with their expert opinions. The final say will be the audience as they will take part in a live polling to select this year’s Innovator Idol III Winner.

First place winner of Innovator Idol II, Temporal Power, is the developer of a breakthrough technology that solves the challenge of accommodating the variability of renewable power generation onto the electrical grid system.

“Innovator Idol provided us with a great opportunity to introduce Temporal Power to an array of different people. There were a lot of investors, entrepreneurs and overall knowledge in the room that we could gain from,” said Cam Carver, CEO of Temporal Power and the first-place winner of Innovator Idol.

Registration for the third annual Innovator Idol is now open. Seating is limited! Register today.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Joseph Wilson

What motivates you to innovate?

There is a snare drum being played in the MaRS lobby.  As any drummer will tell you, it’s not a regular drum, but a “collapsible drum” designed by James Paterson at Humber College start-up expanDrums.  The drum has a removable segment that allows it to be played at a big, boomy rock show or an intimate jazz gig – a seriously useful invention for a professional drummer.

Entrepreneurs like Paterson pass through the halls of MaRS every day with a wide array of products and inventions – what motivates entrepreneurs like this? Below is a list of observations meant to understand the entrepreneurial mind:

1. Problem-solving. The most common impetus for an invented product or service is that it solves a problem an entrepreneur is having. Paterson was frustrated by having to buy multiple snare drums, and sought to create solution to his problem. Serial entrepreneurs are often addicted to recognizing problems and seeing them as opportunities to create value by solving problems.

2. Creativity. Inventing brand new solutions to existing problems requires a certain propensity towards nonlinear thinking. Where others see constraints, a creative entrepreneur will identify ways of circumventing those barriers with brand new ideas. These solutions often come from exploring analogous problems in unrelated fields. The eighteenth century English coffee houses provided an “emergent platform” (in the words of Steven Johnson) for ideas from different fields to bump up against one another and to be re-purposed in new situations.

3. Aesthetics. Software coders will often admit that what they seek to elicit from their code is not functionality, but a sense of aesthetics.  Code can be “elegant” or “clean” in the way it enables a user to solve a problem, and scorn is often heaped on “sloppy” code, even if it functions adequately. Scientists will often talk of elegant solutions to complex problems. The explanatory power of evolution, the satisfaction of swiping an iPhone screen, or the grandeur of a giant hydro-electric damn could all be described as beautiful solutions to complex problems.

4. Ego.  Entrepreneurs are often motivated by a desire to be recognized as a world-leader in a specific field.  Their desire to share their knowledge and engage with their subject matter is often a source of frustration to privacy-obsessed VCs, but is a key internal motivation for the inventor.  Stoking the ego doesn’t even have to come by external recognition. Thousands of anonymous contributors to Wikipedia and other open-source platforms like Linux are motivated by the internal satisfaction they glean from sharing their knowledge.

5. Community. Contributions to a specific field of study often serve to strengthen community bonds and social cohesion. Specific fields in engineering, biotech or web development have their own social order and community rules. Many entrepreneurs are more excited by contributing and building communities around their product than they are by protecting their idea with a patent. This is especially true in the open-innovation movement currently touching such diverse fields as biology and education.

6. Challenge. Many entrepreneurs are addicted to the challenge of building a company from nothing.  Serial entrepreneurs often share stories of leaving well-paid, secure jobs to follow a wild hunch into the market. They often fail. But an addiction to solving thorny problems, and the inherent and complex challenges of starting a company, is what keep them inventing and growing.

7. Money. This is a distant last place for many entrepreneurs, a source of never-ending frustration for investors. Entrepreneurs do need to make a living, and many of them have their eyes set on a future of bulging bank accounts and world travel. But often, entrepreneurs don’t focus on money and have their financial decisions thwarted by any of the above factors. Sometimes an entrepreneur is so captivated by an elegant solution to a problem they become blind to the fact that it will never make money. Herein lies the importance of having a talented CFO or investor partners who are prepared to make the tough financial decisions a passionate entrepreneur might not be able to make.

In his latest book, Drive, Daniel Pink introduces us to an amateur oboe-player, staying at home on a Friday night to practice her instrument. In purely rational terms, there is no reason to do such a thing. It is certainly not in the economic self-interest of a “homo economicus,” to use the favorite terminology of the Chicago school of economics.

The motivation for the oboe player is purely internal.  A desire of mastery and the challenge of getting better at something is what drives oboe-players and entrepreneurs alike.

Do you have any other factors you like to add to the list? Feel free to comment below!

Reposted from MaRS

JosephWilson is currently an education advisor at MaRS. He also writes on issues of technology and culture for NOW Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Spacing and Yonge Street. He is the Executive Director of the Treehouse Group, dedicated to fostering innovation by hosting cross-disciplinary events.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Knowlton Thomas

ViDoBounce, a live video social networking website, is the brainchild of a Bishop’s University freshman in Quebec.

Most easily described as a marriage of Facebook and Chatroulette, ViDoBounce allows users to log on and activate their camera to start talking to people from their college, region or really anywhere in the world. Unlike Chatroulette, you can select filters (thankfully).

And if you like who you e-meet, you can friend them like on Facebook, and then video-call them as you please, akin to Skype, or instant message them. In fact, ViDoBounce is quite integrated with Facebook (you can login through your Facebook and go through to friend’s Facebook profiles).

While at first it seems a shameless ripoff of a couple currently popular services, its simple and clever mesh of three different successful things (Facebook, Chatroulette, and Skype) creates what has the potential to be a fairly useful network.

The vulnerability I observe is that if Facebook created a Skype-esque component, ViDoBounce would be DOA. Same goes with Microsoft adding a social network element to Skype. Or even Chatroulette… nevermind, that site will never change. Anyway, ViDoBounce is definitely worth taking a look at.

Reposted from Techvibes Media

Knowlton Thomas is the Associate Editor of Techvibes Media. He is also the Web Editor of The Other Press, a weekly newspaper, and a regular columnist for them as well.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers provide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By Joseph Wilson

When Shane Shah was three, he blew up his first speaker. “My Dad taught me how to join two wires together so I wired up all the speakers in the house,” he says. “After they blew up I opened them up to try and fix them.”

Ever since, Shah, worked to hone his skills repairing and designing his own speakers. Now he runs Canadian Speaker Works Pro, a design and manufacturing studio in Toronto. His speakers are used by musicians as diverse as the Black-Eyed Peas, Shania Twain and KISS.

“Many of these artists will stipulate as part of their performance contracts that the stage be equipped with CSW speakers,” says Shah. In response, AV companies in the States are starting to use CSW speakers exclusively, to give them an edge over their competitors.

Usually, speaker manufacturers order pre-made components from all over the world and assemble them before they hit the market. Since Shah’s shop designs, manufacturers and assembles all their own components, the specifications are much tighter. “We’ve built the ideal box for speakers,” says Shah. “We go through a long testing process… to make sure the audio is the best it can be.”

And louder: “Our speakers are four times louder in the front than in the back.” Usually, he explains, speakers leak sound around them in a circle, making it difficult for musicians on stage to hear properly. “90% of the time, when you hear feedback at a concert it comes from the bass,” he says. “We direct the bass to the front of the speaker, which benefits the industry by reducing feedback.”

Now this industry innovation has been formally recognized in Canada. Shah was recently nominated for a 2011 Manning Innovation Award for “Canadian citizens who have demonstrated recent innovative talent in developing a successfully marketing a new concept.”

Named after the former Alberta Premier, the Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation was created in 1980 by former CEO of Alberta Energy Company, David E. Mitchell.

Since its inception, the Foundation has sifted through over 2,500 nominees, and doled out $4 million in prizes to 216 winners, all in order encourage and recognize Canadian innovators like Shah.

Think you’ve got the next game-changing innovation? Nominations for the 2012 Manning Innovation Award are open until December 1, 2011 – click here for eligibility and judging criteria.

Reposted from MaRS

JosephWilson is currently an education advisor at MaRS. He also writes on issues of technology and culture for NOW Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Spacing and Yonge Street. He is the Executive Director of the Treehouse Group, dedicated to fostering innovation by hosting cross-disciplinary events.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers pro vide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.

By James Burchill

RBC Capital Markets General Manager Mike Abramsky noted to investors recently that his firm believes the tablet market is going to explode quickly. He noted that while Apple will hold the market for the near-term, by the end of 2014, Android would hold sway and that at least 185 million tablet computers will be on the market by then as well.

Tablets themselves, he continued, would be a $70 billion market in 2014 (up from $10 billion last year). With Android and Apple systems facing off, those in the marketing industry will need to diversify to stay current.

 Why Tablets Matter in Marketing

Tablets will replace notebook and even Netbook computers for many users. Currently, iPad adopters are almost exclusively males aged 22-45 with an upper-level income. This is one of the hottest and most sought-after markets out there and they’re using tablets.

This trend will grow and as tablets proliferate, their market audience will widen. Tablet users tend to be more engaged, more apt to focus in a single-tasking environment, and to be more accessible for marketing.

If you get in early.

JAMES BURCHILL shows individuals and companies how to profit from the innovative use of Internet technologies, strategic content and social media marketing. You can find out more at James’ website and you can subscribe to his J-List and get over 40 articles, reports and advice on Internet Marketing today.

The RIC blog is designed as a showcase for entrepreneurs and innovation. Our guest bloggers provide a wealth of information based on their personal experiences. Visit RIC Centre for more information on how RIC can accelerate your ideas to market.