Not too old to be pleasantly surprised

I was invited to a cattle call at the TSX Gallery last week, and went with what one could describe as “low expectations”.

The event was a 10:30am reception to meet Ontario’s new Minister of Research and Innovation (“MRI”), John Milloy. In a recent cabinet shuffle, Ontario Premier McGuinty gave Minister Milloy the added responsibility of MRI to go along with his existing job as Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities.

MRI was given “carriage” of the venture capital file sometime during 2008, and normally industries like to think that “having their own Minister” is a good thing. Rather than sharing “their” Minister with every professor, post secondary student and administrator across the province.

The Ontario VC, start-up and innovation ecosystem has had their own boss for some time now, but I don’t mind the fact that Minister Milloy has been given the chore of fixing Ontario’s broken Innovation ecosystem.

Let’s be honest, most voters associate on-campus R&D with the rest of the company-building path: commercialization, the friends and family round, the Angel financing round, the VC round, and then the ultimate initial public offering.

As I think most would agree, this ecosystem hasn’t worked for some time. On-campus R&D hasn’t created as many companies as the investments would intimate, and the Province’s VC industry has been in crisis for several years (see prior representative posts “Brutal venture capital stats for H1 2007” August 1-07 and “Ontario politicians asked to address deteriorating VC climate part 2” October 26-07).

Minister Milloy has but one brain, so nothing can fall between the cracks; items can’t be punted between Ministers when there’s only one. And if he was able to get through both a Masters at LSE and try his hand at Oxford, there is plenty of gray matter there to keep track of the issues that we are collectively trying to deal with.

Which brings us back to the cattle call. Despite actively working on behalf of the CVCA on VC issues over the past two years, I’d never had the chance to meet Minister Milloy’s predecessor. Although we had spent time with Ministers Duncan and Pupatello on VC matters, we sadly never had the chance to meet “our man” during his tenure.

During his speech, Minister Milloy came across as both warm and of good humour; he actually had us laughing out loud. Really. VCs laughing during a recession — not easy to pull off; I could see why he carried the riding of Kitchener Centre.

There is a huge mountain to climb to revitalize Ontario’s Innovation Economy. And part of that falls to the provincial government. There is no replacement for the cancelled LSIF program, and the Ontario Venture Capital Fund appears to be rolling out slower than anyone had hoped. The Emerging Technologies Fund has been received well by many, but the devil will be in the details when they are made public on July 31st.

All that being said, Premiery McGunity appears to have given our industry a good partner to work with; and for this we are grateful.

MRM