Note: This article originally appeared in New Brunswick’s provincial newspaper, the Telegraph-Journal.

Bridging the info gap

by Erin O’Halloran, principal and information specialist at CloudScout Information Services.

To cap off the 2011 Canadian Small Business Week, let’s reflect on a big idea – bridging the gap between innovation and commercialization. Many jurisdictions are doing so through incubation centres where businesses “hatch” into successful enterprises. The announcement this week regarding the donations for a new innovation and entrepreneurship centre at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) means the province will soon be taking part in the highly competitive business incubation race.

Funding for the centre is coming from two internationally known businessmen, Gururaj Deshpande and Gerry Pond. Gururaj Deshpande is a UNB alumnus and co-chair of United States National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Gerry Pond is an Atlantic Canadian technology-sector expert, who’s been involved with the launch of Radian6 and Q1 Labs. Together the two will launch the Pond-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

There’s been a lot of talk on how this new Centre will be structured and how it will support the next generation of entrepreneurs in New Brunswick and the Maritime region. Reported earlier this week in the Telegraph-Journal, the future structure and objectives of the centre have been compared to other success stories of academic and private-sector partnerships in Canada and the United States.

The discussion surrounding the similarities among the partnerships focused mainly on how mentorship, infrastructure support, and research and development will foster innovation and entrepreneurship. What’s been left out so far in this discussion is the support for entrepreneur’s daily information needs, which support vital business functions such as:

*Information for business plans and investor pitches;

*Research, writing, and editorial support for sector development projects;

*Information on markets, industries, companies, intellectual property, and finance; and

*Current awareness resources, including email updates and custom search alerts on topics of long-term interest.

These business information needs were identified as some of the most common for entrepreneurs in Toronto’s MaRs Discovery District, a successful innovation and entrepreneurship incubator.

Since 2005, the MaRS discovery district has grown into a 700,000-square foot space for research labs, offices, and event facilities, in addition to virtual space. It has a market intelligence team made up of librarians employed by the University of Toronto, business advisors and local entrepreneurs, who provide support for clients. Together they serve more than 130 active internal and external entrepreneurs; service to MaRS clients is free of charge.

The librarians embedded within the MaRS market intelligence team published an article in 2010 detailing the information needs of their clients. They say client inquiries are never simple and require answers pieced together from multiple sources such as market research reports, newspaper archives, government documents and statistics, industry association web sites, trade publications and free Internet sources. Although it isn’t easy, the often obscure and complicated research for innovators and entrepreneurs is reported to be increasing commercialization capacity for MaRS participants.

In the end, commercialization is what counts in incubation centres. The ideas, products, and services do not need to be original or unique. What they do need is the potential to generate profits and the support to get them there. For instance, one of MaRS’ success stories is Sysomos, a company similar to Radian6, which develops social media monitoring software.

Therefore, it will be important to remember that as the Pond-Deshpande Centre takes form we can study the other jurisdictions that have been incubating innovators and entrepreneurs for years. New Brunswick can learn from their successes and mistakes to ensure the participants of the province’s new incubator are first to market, sign the big contracts, and reinvest into the next generation of entrepreneurs.