Brock BioLinc receives funding of $843,500 from FedDev Ontario

Brock BioLinc receives funding of $843,500 from FedDev Ontario

 

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev) has generously funded a new economic initiative through Innovate Niagara, a partnership that includes Brock University, to open up a new Bioscience Incubator known as BioLinc.

Brock University and its partners are honoured to be receiving funding under the leadership of the Hon. Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, and Rick Dykstra, MP for St. Catharines.

For this initiative, FedDev is committing $843, 500 into the Innovate Niagara partnership as seed money for the BioLinc project. This funding will help establish the infrastructure of the program.

Innovate Niagara is currently made up of Brock University, Interactive Niagara Media Cluster, the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce, and the Corporation of the City of St.Catharines. More members are welcome as they can only strengthen our effort to provide incubation services. Through this collaboration the goal will be to provide resources to innovative start-up companies without duplicating efforts.

These resources will help to facilitate the transition of Niagara’s manufacturing based economy to a new knowledge and information based economy, by promoting entrepreneurship, innovation, employment opportunities and growth. This will be accomplished by the Incubators capacity to provide entrepreneurs with resources to research and develop their ideas and properly capitalize on them.

Through initiatives such as BioLinc this collaboration will build novel business clusters that will help small and medium sized enterprises within the same fields become competitive.

BioLinc, including both a physical incubation space and a dynamic web portal, will leverage University expertise while providing much needed support to assist entrepreneurs in establishing and developing their new ventures. The physical incubator will be geared towards helping start-up companies with goals similar to the Biosciences while the virtual incubator will work with a variety of companies. The main physical components will be situated on Brock’s campus in the new Cairn’s Family Health and Bio-science Research Complex.

The goal is to cultivate innovation in a knowledge-based economy within Niagara and connect the innovators with the right resources needed to commercialize their research breakthroughs. The Incubator aims to support commercialization to diversify the economy in an effort to recover from the effects of the recession. Lastly it will help commercialize research and discovery initiatives in Brock University and the surrounding community.

President Jack Lightstone, the Brock community and the Innovate Niagara partners are honoured that the government chose this initiative and that they saw the great potential it has. We all look forward to the new possibilities for Niagara Region’s small and medium enterprise entrepreneurs.

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BioLinc partners, from left: Jeff Chesebrough, CEO, nGen; Keith Cumming, Vice-Ch

BioLinc partners, from left: Jeff Chesebrough, CEO, nGen; Keith Cumming, Vice-Chair, Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce; Walter Sendzik, Interim CEO, Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce; Rudi Kroeker, Chair, Brock University Board of Trustees; Rick Dykstra, MP, St. Catharines; Jack Lightstone, President, Brock University; Gary Libben, Vice-President, Research; N'ora Kalb, program co-ordinator, nGen; Brian McMullan, Mayor, City of St. Catharines; Gary Burroughs, Chair, Niagara Regional Council