Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced Thursday the province will help build a new “innovation arena” in Waterloo, a major centre for Canada’s tech industry.
The arena will be an incubator for new companies and a research facility. It will bring together researchers and entrepreneurs to develop new health technology and commercialize it.
“It will accelerate the development and commercialization of Made in Ontario technologies,” Ford said at a press conference in Waterloo. He said the idea is to make it easier for “homemade innovations to enter the Ontario health system.”
The 90,000-square-foot facility will cost $35 million, and the cost will be split by the University of Waterloo, the City of Kitchener, the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, and a newly announced $7.5 million from the government of Ontario.
In the past two and a half years, the province has attracted $3 billion in investments from global biomanufacturers, Ford said. He said the province is building on that with Ontario’s Life Sciences strategy announced last year, which aims to make the province a life sciences hub. It includes $15 million to help entrepreneurs access capital to “move their ideas from lab to marketplace,” he said.
University of Waterloo President Vivek Goel said at the conference, “Our research and commercialization strengths in areas such as nanoscience, quantum, robotics, and artificial intelligence are being incorporated into new medical and health tech innovations.”
The university’s flagship entrepreneurship program, called Velocity, will be housed in the new arena, he said.
In MacLean’s university ranking this year, Waterloo was named most innovative. Waterloo’s Economic Development Corporation says the city measures up well against tech hubs in the United States in terms of a high concentration of tech talent, high output of computer science graduates, and high research output per capita.
Waterloo is home to Google’s Canadian engineering headquarters, major offices for Square and German software giant SAP, and many other tech companies.