Industry committee  Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you for inviting me. I'm Hossein Rahnama. I'm the director of research and innovation at the Digital Media Zone, which is a start-up incubator based in Toronto that we started about five years ago. The vision we had behind the Digital Media

Industry committee  That's a great question. At Ryerson we are looking at it as a spectrum of innovation. We start in the classroom, probably from the second year of undergrad studies, and we introduce the curricular model that we call the super course. We bring students from different disciplines

Industry committee  That is a very good point you mentioned, because it's another way of looking at both our research and our educational system. If you have a bad mark in your transcript, it will stay with you forever, whereas if we create these parallel environments that if you fail your first sta

Industry committee  Very broadly, I think what we need as a country is that these innovation centres start to work together and emphasize the areas they are strong in. We do not need to replicate exactly the same type of sphere across Canada. We can have an ecosystem of these zones or innovation cen

Industry committee  Yes. I mean, Concordia and Ryerson are great examples. We have visits. We have students coming to us from U of T and Waterloo, and we have other areas, such as Communitech, participating. Hopefully we can scale that further. We would like to scale that, but it's happening alrea

Industry committee  I can talk about Digital Media Zone. Every week we have 10 to 30 tours coming to Digital Media Zone, from very large enterprises to start-ups. We have about 80 start-ups now that are moving towards graduation and they would love to meet with enterprises and partner with them.

Industry committee  Regarding the way we look at funding, I think if you value the commercialization of research, out of which we get disruptive technology, compared to classical discovery-based research, the funding should also become more outcome oriented because the way our granting model works n