About Us
MaRS Innovation (MI) doesn’t own change. We are simply its agent. MI will launch a new generation of high-growth Canadian companies that will become world leaders in their markets and will strengthen existing Canadian companies through the out-licensing of transformative technologies.
A federally incorporated non-profit organization with an international, independent, industry-led Board of Directors, MI is the commercialization agent for our member institutions’ intellectual property—our partners’ strategic strengths in therapeutics, medical devices and diagnostic imaging, information and communications technologies, and advanced manufacturing and clean technologies.
MI is itself an innovation, conceived by our 14 research-intensive universities and health centres. Our partners came together to make sure their inventors’ very best ideas would make it to market.
The Canadian government, through the National Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program, endorsed the MI idea, not just for Toronto but for the country, and in 2008 granted MI $14.95 million over five years. In turn, our research members committed $10 million to MI.
As a result, MI is two sides of the same coin, facing both our member institutions in Toronto; and our investors and the marketplace, to bring value to both through commercializing discovery of global economic and social benefit.
The diversity of our members’ internationally renowned science and their readiness to form a cluster of universities, hospitals and institutes, as members of MI, is unprecedented in North America. Taking that innovation a leap further, working closely with our members’ inventors and technology transfer offices (TTOs), MI also bundles these research assets together, from both science and business perspectives, while keeping the individual integrity of the IP intact.
With access to all IP that inventors disclose to their institutions, MI accepts for commercialization the top 10 percent of the top unencumbered, undiluted IP from our members.
