McMaster helping bring ideas to market
Project will help develop startups, create jobs, disseminate knowledge
McMaster University is working to create a 40,000square-foot space designed to help researchers bring their ideas to market.
The project — located in the McMaster Automotive Resource Centre at McMaster Innovation Park — will include lab space for biomedical firms and startups as well as communal equipment and areas such as boardrooms.
“Entrepreneurship is a contact sport where you have to be bouncing off each other,” Rob Baker, vicepresident of research at McMaster, told The Specta-
tor at a recent editorial board meeting.
“So we’ll have a variety of firms, a variety of startups, all interested in more or less the same types of things, sharing fundamental basic equipment but also bumping into each other for coffee and discussing ideas.”
The idea behind the space is to try and make it easier for startup labs and firms to successfully bring their products to market — a complicated process which can take years, he said.
“The regulations and the clinical trials and all the hoops you have to jump through to be able to put something on the market is incredibly complicated,” he said. “People often talk about a seven-year runway to go from the beginning of an idea before you actually get it out there.”
Designs for the project, which is valued at between $20 million and $25 million, are ready, but it will likely be a year before the space opens its doors to students, researchers and startups, Baker said.
The space will be located in the 90,000-square-foot facility on Longwood Road South, wedged between MARC and the Biomedical Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing centre — a partnership between the university and Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology that is set to open in January.
The city’s economic development director says an investment like this one is “definitely needed” in Hamilton, where the life sciences sector is one of the key employment fields.
Glen Norton said he has been hopeful that attracting the Fraunhofer Institute will also mean attracting smaller companies and research firms that want to commercialize products.
“That’s the advantage of having it right beside them is that we’ll attract some of these one- and twoperson startups who can take some of the research that’s being done and turn it into a commercial product and then move out of there perhaps and grow a big company,” he said.
“That means good-paying jobs for Hamiltonians; it means taking some of the tax burden off of the residential taxpayer and putting it on the industrial taxpayer.”
With the new space, people from the university will be able to apply to rent labs for a year or two at a somewhat reduced rate while they try and spin their idea or product into commercialization, he said.
With McMaster’s strong focus on health research, the firms could range from developing pharmaceuticals to IT startups in fields including health sciences and engineering, Baker said.
While McMaster receives a certain amount of licensing fees from some commercialized ideas brought to market, it’s not a substantial amount, Baker said.
Revenue is not the driver in a project like this, he said.
“Our purpose is not to make money — that’s not what we’re here for,” Baker said. “Our purpose is to generate new knowledge and to get it out there for society to use.”
It doesn’t have to be something tangible, in the form of a device or a chemical. It could be a social policy that impacts society, he said.
Either way, the goal of a project like this is to ensure crucial products or information are not sitting on a shelf somewhere without anyone knowing about them.
“We need to be involved in this just to get our knowledge out to the public,” Baker said.