A Winnipeg business incubator is teaching entrepreneurs how to take their dream to the next level.
“The Eureka Project mandate is to help what I like to call ‘passionate creators of technology or widgets commercializing their inventions,’ ” said Gary Brownstone, who until recently led the project.
Some of the companies the project has helped are seeing returns in the tens of millions of dollars.
Clients include scientists, engineers and computer programmers who have developed or are developing some kind of new technology.
They typically have little or no business experience, which is where Brownstone and his team come in.
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“Our team has expertise with taking this technology to market, finding customers and helping the founder build companies around technology,” said Brownstone.
When Brownstone finished his schooling, he became involved with companies poised for growth but that needed professional management and someone to shepherd them through the process.
“When I was recruited into this position, I saw the opportunity to do that over and over and over again, to help small companies through that first phase of growth, help get them on some solid footing for the future,” said Brownstone.
“Ideas are easy and execution is difficult … so a lot of companies for a variety of reasons will not succeed in actually commercializing their technology or not commercializing it to a degree that it’s a viable business.”
Brownstone asks three questions when someone comes to the Eureka Project with an idea to determine whether he will be able to work with them:
- Is the technology real? Depending on the technology, Brownstone might use his close working relationship with the University of Manitoba to answer that question.
- Is the individual or team capable? Do they have the talent to run with the idea? Are they coachable in terms of their own capabilities and capacity? What are their skill sets and backgrounds?
- Can a market be identified? There is no point developing technology if there are no customers for it.)
“In our line of work, because of the backgrounds of the people coming in the door, that’s the question that they most overlook,” said Brownstone.
“They tend to look at the world as technology push instead of market pull. We try to turn that conversation around really early on. If you were to come in the door, we’d go through the three questions and satisfy ourselves that the answers are ‘yes,’ ‘yes’ and ‘yes.’ ”
Brownstone has developed a sliding scale that allows clients to pay as little as a couple hundred dollars a month for the service in the beginning.
“We really want to remain accessible to those that have the best likelihood of becoming (successful),” he said.
“In order to do that, we try to keep our fees as low as possible so that money isn’t really a barrier for them working with us. So we offset a lot of the costs of delivering services to our clients because we built a very strong, broad base of support. We get financial help from the province of Manitoba (and) we get some financial help from the U of M. We’ve built a very broad sponsorship program so that the corporate community supports us and our clients.”
Companies that start to grow begin hiring staff and gradually start paying more of the real cost.
“It kind of puts the pressure on us to deliver what we promise we deliver when they come in the door,” said Brownstone.
“If we are able to help them finance and grow their companies, they should be able to pay us a little bit more for what we do.”
Agro-tech is one of Eureka’s three main categories, which includes functional food and nutraceuticals.
“They are finding ways to take out of legumes that which is good from legumes and add it into foods that are more commonly eaten,” said Brownstone.
“They are finding ways to take foliate out of broccoli and put it into chocolate chip cookies. They are trying to put components into foods to target specific health challenges.”
The project also invests in food processing technologies, but “we’re not talking about foods or making granny’s best jam,” Brownstone said.
“It leads to one of our success stories, a company we used to work with, Canadian Prairie Garden Puree Products Inc., now located in Portage la Prairie. They developed a very unique process for pureeing vegetables so that they can be used in soup and juice bases for companies like Campbell’s that make a lot of soups and juices.”
