Poll: Merger support rises
Wood pellet exports double
Nearly $500K for car crash
Minister defends right to bail
Vise grips as steering wheel
$36M for vaccine injury 
New US rules for airlines 
Historic Trump hearing 
Pig kidney transplant 
Big loss for Boeing 
Metro sales edged higher
Retail sales slip 
Warriors snakebitten in loss
Iginla off to Europe
Rockets ink prospect
Perry teams with Lu Kala
Megan denies harassment
Swift ‘one of the family’
What do you do with a problem that you can't google? If you were a company on the brink of extensive growth but lacked the skills to know the best next step to evolve or fine tune your product where would you turn?
Well I think the majority of us don't know about a small but extremely effective non-profit in Canada called Mitacs.
Their mandate is simply to connect universities with the world.
From my point of view it's becoming pretty obvious that one of the economic drivers in our community that is not yet reaching its full potential is our communities connection with UBCO. We need to make more connections between our University and business community especially in a way that creates new patents for companies to expand their market reach with. Somehow I feel that our collective image of UBCO is simply the place where students go and that image needs to evolve. UBCO features some of the top experts in various fields and, guess what, they are looking for local connections within their fields of study or expertise.
This fall I'll be spending a significant amount of time trying to unearth just what type of gems can be uncovered at UBCO because I also feel like I'm in the dark on much of what goes on in the growing community of over 10,000 students and faculty.
Today let's focus on Mitacs, a non-profit, that does two very simple things:
1) Connect businesses, non-profits, start-ups to the minds and research potential at UBCO
2) Covers 50% of the cost of getting the answers to problems that you won't find on google by connecting you with grad students that can work on solving problems.
A quick scan of their websites (https://www.mitacs.ca/en/search?keys=okanagan) shows that there are already lots of local companies taking advantage of this option including software companies, safety liners for hockey helmets, wood working companies, etc.
I'm not the expert so if you want to dig further I'm going to suggest two things watch my interview above featuring Jennifer Tedman Jones from Mitacs and go to their website (perhaps even send them an email)
If you are looking for events this week I have two to suggest for you that you will absolutely love:
1) Buskers on Bernard, Thu, Aug 13th, 7-8pm
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
