Reflections on my experience as an executive at North America’s largest urban innovation hub
In February 2017 I received a call from Joeri van den Steenhoven: “Alex, I have to go home to the Netherlands for family reasons, and I think you’re the only person in Canada who can do my job. You need to come to MaRS!” Having just founded my own social enterprise — Synthetikos — I was skeptical, but my wife Eleanor convinced me to give it a shot. I met with MaRS’ founding CEO Ilse Treurnicht, and she also convinced me to move to Toronto and take the role.
It’s now February 2023 and as I return to my own practice with Synthetikos I want to share some lessons from my experience. The work of shifting systems is always both an outer and an inner journey. That’s also how I’ve structured this post, by talking about some of the grand challenges my teams, colleagues, partners and I tackled, and what I learned from the experience. I led more than 100 innovation projects at MaRS, but for this post I’ve chosen to focus on just a few so I can write in more depth.
From Lab to Scale: Assembling the People and Platforms to Shift Systems
In my first meeting on my first day at MaRS, Jerry Koh briefed me on a social innovation lab the team was leading on youth employment called Opportunity for All Youth (O4AY). “I think you should kill it, it’s never going to take off.” I could empathize with Jerry’s frustration, but I wasn’t ready to make such a big decision on my first day. I wanted to meet all the stakeholders first and see if there was a big idea here. The employer workshops had a real energy to them, Ross Anderson at Starbucks was a highly committed and persuasive leader of the employer coalition, and there was definitely an innovation here that made O4AY unique. Whereas every other youth employment program in Canada started from the supply side to upskill youth, O4AY started by building an employer coalition to understand their talent needs and then removing every barrier for the youth to get these jobs. When you come to the table with tens of thousands of jobs you have the power to actually shift the system. So I told Jerry to keep working on it, and he convinced Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) to provide $4m in core funding over 3 years to scale beyond the seed funding we’d received from Starbucks and the McConnell Foundation. ESDC had never funded systems change before, but they had visionary leadership in their Youth Employment and Skills Strategy team and formed a strategic collaborators table with several other systems change initiatives they were now funding along the youth mentoring and employment journey.
ESDC’s funding allowed us to take O4AY from a lab convening to a dedicated team. Over a 5 year period, we helped place 23,500 youths into jobs with a 8–20% higher retention rate and a 60% lower cost to employers. The credit for these results is not mine. It is thanks to the incredible team we built under Angela Simo Brown’s leadership to turn Ross, Joeri and Jerry’s bold vision into tens of thousands of life-changing experiences for barriered youth across Canada. How did they do it? Here’s a quick overview of the main activities and workstreams that underpinned these outstanding results:
- Publicly launched O4AY in 2018 with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and 300 youth for a job fair at the Rexdale Public Library.
- Established an Advisory Board, an employer Executive Committee, a Youth Innovation Council, and built partnerships with youth employment service agencies across the country.
- Secured additional sources of funding from ESDC, Indigenous Services Canada and The Cooperators to grow the coalition to over 30 corporations, expand operations to 40 cities across Canada, and grow the team to 40 people.
- Rebranded from O4AY to a youth-facing brand MyStartr.
- Ran multi-employer job fairs from coast to coast, and pivoted to all-virtual deliveries during the pandemic.
- Worked with the employers to remove unintentional barriers in their hiring processes, including simplifying and improving the accessibility of application forms, and making sure that workplaces were more welcoming for racialized youth.
- Ran design jams with the Youth Innovation Council and trained them to host jams with their peers to ensure all major aspects of the youth-facing side of the MyStartr platform were designed by youth, for youth.
- Created the MentorU MentorMe reverse mentoring program to increase the social networks of disconnected youth, as well as a coaching program and a podcast.
- Created an Indigenous Youth Employment Program to listen to Indigenous youth and elders to appreciate the unique barriers facing First Nations, Metis and Inuit youth.
- Built a digital platform to standardize and automate youth enrollment and interview scheduling, and enrolled over 9,500 active youth on the platform.
- Ran analytics to prove our impact and provide unique insights to employers and government.
These activities were guided by a theory of change and constantly adapted based on experience. Along the way there were countless curveballs and barriers the team had to overcome. There were three polarities inherent in the coalition’s design that were not problems to be solved, but ongoing tensions to be managed:
- Meeting the needs of employers and meeting the needs of youth.
- Helping the most youth and helping the most barriered youth.
- Deepening core government funding and diversifying funding sources.
One way this played out was in the different motivations, cultural norms and language between employers and youth. These differences are a source of tension in the world that also manifests within the team between youth-facing and employer-facing team members. Layer on to this the government funder’s motivations, norms and language and it’s a lot for the team to constantly navigate. It’s critical to have clear and explicit purpose, vision, mission and values that you can anchor on to remind the team that MyStartr exists to bridge and align the interests of youth, employers and government.
I’ve helped lead large scale transformations before, but MyStartr is the first time I’ve been deeply involved in scaling an idea from a social innovation lab all the way to a national program with impact at scale. Wanting this experience was the main reason I decided to join MaRS. So much has been written about the early stages of lab work, yet there are so few examples of successful scaling. While at MaRS, I also had the privilege of helping Mark Abbott scale Tech Stewardship from a lab into a national practice program with 40 partner organizations and over 6,000 participants in 2022. Tech Stewardship is a completely different kind of systems change, yet many of the same challenges, polarities, tensions and design patterns are in play.
My biggest learning from scaling systems change at MaRS is that nothing is more important than finding and developing the right people. Having the right leader supported by a diverse and high performing team is critical to success. But how do you know who is right to lead this difficult work? I was recently invited to participate in an Ashoka Canada Fellow Selection Panel. They have the most rigorous selection process I’ve experienced, and employ 5 criteria for electing their Fellows: New Idea, Creativity, Entrepreneurial Quality, Social Impact, and Ethical Fiber. In the countries where Ashoka operates, their rule of thumb is that one in a million people will satisfy these criteria. Mark Abbott was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2022, and embodies all of the ideals. Angela Simo Brown was a gamechanger when I found her to lead MyStartr, and I see these same qualities in her leadership. We worked with PilotPMR last year to rebrand one of my teams, and the new brand attributes were also a perfect description of our people: fresh, bright, plugged in, disciplined, affirming, and social minded. The extraordinary dedication of my team and the marathon struggle required to shift systems means that burn-out is all too common. I had frequent conversations with my direct reports about self-care and talked openly with my business unit about mental health. On the flip side, it’s vital to celebrate the wins as a team and have fun along the journey.
A design pattern that is essential for both MyStartr and Tech Stewardship to achieve scale is the platform business model. We never thought of these initiatives just as programs. They were multi-sided platforms matching employers with unemployed youth (MyStartr) and students with practicing engineers (Tech Stewardship). However, most of the literature on platform business models is focused on the big tech platforms and startups wanting to scale into platform monopolies (one exception is https://platform.coop/).
We needed to adapt the platform business model for social innovation. Many of the same principles apply: identify the atomic unit of value (one youth served); create market density (phased approach to scaling city by city); digitize transactions (online self-serve content and interview registrations); run analytics continuously to optimize engagement (analyzing the impact of marketing campaigns and variances in interview offers by employer, event and city). However, we were not trying to create and defend a monopoly, so we did not need or want to blitzscale platform growth. We were funded by grants, not capital, and our funders had very different objectives than venture capital. We cared more about scaling the social impact of our systems change initiatives than maximizing engagement on our platform. As a result, the MyStartr and Tech Stewardship platforms are more open by design, and we prioritized collaboration over competition with other actors in the ecosystem. We were also critically reflective of the potential for platform design decisions to exacerbate existing inequities, and instead designed our platforms with equity and inclusion at the centre. This is particularly important when it comes to policies on data privacy, data use and pricing structure.
Challenge Accepted: Innovation Challenges and Challenge-Based Procurement
Shahab Shahnazari established the innovation challenge practice at MaRS, which Chad Hartnell took over in 2021. Between them, they led over a dozen challenges and awarded over $6m in prize money.
One of the most impactful challenges we have hosted is the MaRS and CIBC Inclusive Design Challenge Series. The Inclusive Design Challenge aims to identify and overcome the most pressing employment barriers faced by persons with disabilities (PwD). As we scoped out the opportunity to remove barriers to employment for PwD, we quickly realized the problem was too complex to be solved by a single challenge. Tim Rose is the disability advocate and visionary at CIBC who saw the potential of a challenge series to bring together the disability and innovation communities to catalyze systems change. We also partnered with Varun Chandak who was heading up Canada’s first accelerator for accessibility startups, Access to Success. Working closely with Tim and Varun, in 2020 we entered into a five year partnership with CIBC and Access to Success to better understand the career journey for PwD and then organize challenges for each stage of the journey.
We began by conducting research into the scale of the challenge and the barriers facing PwD from reaching their potential at work. We put people with lived experience of the barriers at the centre of this research process to understand the journey from their perspective. In 60 submissions we received from PwD, we heard about the deeply entrenched biases they faced in their careers. At least half had received direct feedback like: “This job really isn’t for you.” The impact of these biases showed up in national statistics. In 2017, one in five Canadians between the ages of 25 and 64 identified as having a disability. Only 59% of these individuals were employed. Of those who were not employed, nearly 40% had the potential for paid work but were unable to find suitable work. Through our research, we realized this was the most under-utilized talent pool in Canada.
As we learned about both the problem and the potential to make change, we identified four key stages in the career journey:
- Access to Work: Finding work, recruitment and disclosing disability.
- Support at Work: Adaptive technologies and flexible and inclusive workplaces.
- Career Advancement: Overcoming stigma, recognition of skills and professional advancement.
- Future of Work: Hybrid future of work and full adoption of the Accessible Canada Act.
We then framed and launched an annual innovation challenge around each stage of the journey. Investing in the up-front research and committing to a series of four challenges allowed us to direct the innovation challenges towards the areas of greatest need and opportunity. It also helped us to build relationships and locate innovation hotspots in the disability and innovation communities. The partnership with Access to Success was also critical to the challenge series’ success. Their accessibility accelerator provided tailored post-challenge supports to challenge finalists, which built community and helped drive adoption.
My team at MaRS also introduced innovative challenge-based procurement methods into hospitals, municipalities and corporates. Our challenge-based procurement model evolved over 6 years through three generations of procurement innovation: Innovation Partnership: Procurement by Co-Design (IPPCD), Municipal Innovation Exchange (MIX), and the MaRS and KPMG Climate Impact Accelerator (CIA).
IPPCD offered healthcare providers something rare: the opportunity to participate in the development of innovative solutions before procuring them. In turn, technology and service innovators with scalable business models could gain unprecedented access to end users and validate use cases to remain competitive. IPPCD matched healthcare providers with startups to co-design patient-centred solutions through a six month co-design process. Starting with a challenge brief, hospitals would select a vendor and then work together to discover, design, prototype, evaluate and make a decision to procure the co-designed solution.
An independent evaluation of the IPPCD process documented the case study of the innovation partnership between Trinity Village Health Care and Toronto-based startup VitalHub. The result was the DOCit app, which automates documentation and reporting processes for personal support workers. The evaluation found this was a win for both Trinity Village and VitalHub. DOCit helped Trinity Village improve the level of care to patients while saving $75,000 per year. For VitalHub, they gained early access to a first customer, resulting in development of a scalable product. To our surprise, Trinity Village and VitalHub developed such a deep partnership they entered into a formal revenue sharing agreement. This allowed Trinity Village to create a new recurring revenue stream from DOCit sales. It also allowed VitalHub to scale faster adoption of their solution by having a health care partner to champion the innovation from within the healthcare system.
The Municipal Innovation Exchange program combined lessons from running IPPCD with the City of Guelph’s Civic Accelerator program to innovate complex procurement in the municipal sector. The MaRS team created an open source MIX challenge tool kit and ran innovation procurements with the municipalities of Guelph, Barrie and London. MIX was demonstrated to be an effective approach to helping municipalities procure privacy-protective sensors, AI solutions and social innovation platforms to address practical problems such as pothole repair, park monitoring and snow removal.
The Climate Impact Accelerator has now extended the innovation procurement model beyond a single procurement decision to create an accelerated pathway to enterprise scale deployment of venture solutions. To achieve this we developed a channel partnership with KPMG Canada’s innovation advisory team headed up by Dan Resnick. The CIA focuses on KPMG’s corporate clients who have set ambitious net zero targets and require cleantech innovation solutions to achieve them. The process helps corporates to define their ambitions, aggregate needs across divisions, source and scale adoption-ready solutions. MaRS brings its ecosystem of 1,400 ventures, including 240 pureplay cleantech ventures, and its challenge expertise, to source solutions that meet the corporate needs. The key innovation in the CIA is breaking startups out of “pilot purgatory” to create an accelerated pathway to commercial scale deployment by default so long as performance metrics are achieved at each stage of the process.
Every challenge and challenge-based procurement I participated in at MaRS with my team was an incredible experience. When large organizations try to do all their innovation in-house, the process is amorphous and opaque, laden with tension, risk, resistance, delays and cost over-runs. When these same organizations run their first open innovation challenge, they are amazed that the innovation process can be transparent, finite, timely and impactful. Every stage of the journey creates good news stories, builds trust and collaboration, and creates forward momentum.
Here’s what I learned about why challenges work. Challenge-based approaches match the sponsoring organization with individuals, teams or startups with viable solutions. Startups are small and nimble. They accept risk, iterate rapidly, and pivot in order to rapidly find and create new value. The sponsoring organizations are large and established. They have the reputation, resources, networks and distribution channels to deploy new solutions at scale. Precisely because the sponsoring organizations are designed to operate at scale, the layers of internal stage gates, approvals and authorities required to coordinate and optimize operations also prevent the organization from moving fast and accepting risk. The challenge process allows large organizations and startups to each focus on what they are designed to do best. For the sponsoring organization, a challenge transforms the perilous process of invention into the much more manageable problem of search. For startups, challenges offer much more than a cash prize. They are a pathway to adoption at scale, both through partnering with the sponsoring organization, as well as through the publicity and credibility boost from winning.
The other common thread for our challenge and procurement innovations was the central role of partnership. I learned a lot about what made for good partnerships, both from successes as well as from several difficult partnerships. Our best partnerships were with organizations with shared values and objectives and complementary capabilities. Personal relationships at both the sponsor and project level are critical. We did our best work with a highly engaged partner who would challenge us and be open to respectful challenge. We wanted a partner to co-design with us, rather than a typical client-consultant relationship. Lightweight project governance was important to anticipate and agree on issues resolution before conflict occurred. The most important areas to agree on up front are purpose, principles, budgeting, IP and communications, since these are some of the most likely flashpoints. Although it requires an investment of time and effort to establish shared expectations and clear accountability up front, it is worth it to set the conditions for a successful and lasting collaboration.
Orchestrating Outcomes: Missions and Transitions
Innovation hubs perform three broad functions: brokering, convening and orchestrating. Brokering introductions between entrepreneurs and capital providers, customers, policymakers and talent reduces frictions, facilitating deals and transactions. Convening brings innovators together, breaking down silos across sectors and organizations. Orchestrating directs the innovation ecosystem towards big audacious goals.
In 2019, MaRS CEO Yung Wu challenged me to assemble all of the components of MaRS’ convening power — place, venture, systems change and communications — to orchestrate impact at a new level of scale. The result was Mission from MaRS: Climate Impact Challenge. The early design work was led by Ariel Sim and the program was launched under Tyler Hamilton’s leadership. Inspired by Marianna Mazzucato’s mission-oriented innovation approach, the Mission from MaRS sought to identify Canada’s 10 highest potential carbon emissions reduction technologies and then assembled coalitions to break down systems barriers to their adoption.
The Climate Impact Challenge focused on the energy, real estate and transportation sectors, which account for more than 70 percent of Canada’s GHG emissions. Using a two-stage process, applications from cleantech companies from across Canada were shortlisted and evaluated for their potential impact. Using the Carbon Reduction Assessment of New Enterprises (CRANE) tool, we were able to estimate the emissions reduction potential for shortlisted ventures. We also assembled SMEs to assess the team, business model and traction to ensure the cleantech solution was ready to scale.
The 10 climate champions identified through this process were:
- Energy: Carbon Engineering, Extract Energy, Opus One Solutions and StormFisher
- Real Estate: BrainBoxAI, Peak Power, Stash Energy
- Transportation: Effenco, Flash Forest, Pantonium
If their technologies attained 1 percent global market share by 2040, it could reduce emissions by 420 Megatons each year — about 60 percent of Canada’s current annual GHG emissions. To help them accelerate adoption, each venture identified a top systemic barrier they were currently facing. These included customer awareness, regulations, government procurement, supply chain issues, financing and impact measurement. To address their barriers, MaRS assembled a coalition of suppliers, manufacturing partners, investors, regulators, policymakers and potential customers representing 44 leading Canadian organizations. Each coalition established an action roadmap identifying barriers and objectives — short-, medium- and long-term — to overcome the barriers. The Phase 1 Mission from MaRS Report documented the key year one achievements:
- Establishing a first-of-its-kind municipal procurement strategy with the City of Toronto aimed at purchasing cleantech services and products from the 10 participating ventures.
- Inspiring and enabling the creation of the Climate Impact Accelerator in partnership with KPMG Canada.
- Supporting three ventures through acquisition and/or strategic partner processes that will scale their technologies.
- Raising $42 million in investment capital and generating $27 million in new revenues.
- Providing all 10 ventures with insights on pursuing new markets, honing marketing messages and advancing policy reforms geared at enabling cleantech adoption.
In April 2020, one month after the global pandemic was declared by the WHO, Jayne Engle from the McConnell Foundation called me up and asked if I was interested in joining her and Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs to create a space to adopt a long view of the implications of the pandemic for society. Without hesitation I said yes! Jayne, Indy and I had been collaborating for the past 3 years social and civic innovation so we were starting from a shared understanding.
We started by mapping the cascading risks from multiple entangled crises: the global pandemic, disrupted supply chains, eroding mental health, rising income and wealth inequality, systemic racism, climate change, disinformation, and increasing polarization. We recognized this as a moment of potential for major transition — and an age of increasing uncertainty and long emergencies brought about by the collapse of an unsustainable and unjust paradigm. We noticed in this transitionary moment, many orthodoxies were being upended: relocalization of supply chains, hyper-intensification of the home, acceleration of remote work, learning and health care, and rising discontent with pre-existing inequities exposed and amplified by the pandemic. All of these fissures created a window of opportunity for radical change — but also the risk of snap-back.
The Emergence Room created a collaborative environment for emergent initiatives that nurture deep, structural transition. It was designed with four key components:
An experiment attractor to help individuals with transformative ideas to rapidly test, iterate, and build momentum and followership for new experiments and narratives;
A mission accelerator for established institutions to set bold transition goals that transcend the boundaries and mandates of their individual organizations and mobilize an ecosystem of bottom-up solutions;
Transition finance infrastructure to mobilize new financial mechanisms and pools of capital that seed and sustain investment in the creation of flourishing futures, together with everyone, across all sectors, and for generations to come;
A digital platform to aggregate and amplify place-based transition experiments, connect people and missions with each other, and drive a coherent and compelling narrative of transition.
The six societal missions within the Emergence Room were:
- Participatory social infrastructure empowers citizens to be co-producers of transitions in their communities;
- 21st century learning equips citizens with the skills and adaptability to navigate transitions in the future of work and life;
- Community wealth invests in civic assets and community infrastructure to drive inclusive growth and sustainable prosperity;
- Climate action accelerates the transition to a low carbon economy.
- Societal mental health invests in preventative mental healthcare to nurture individual and collective wellbeing;
- Future democracy and economy reimagines democratic capitalism in a decolonized and regenerative future.
Many of the initiatives Jayne, Indy and I were leading or would initiate during the pandemic nested within these mission areas. Examples included Mission from MaRS, Civic Capital, Community Wealth Sharing Initiative, Radicle Civics and Sacred Civics.
Led by Sue Talusan at MaRS, we designed and ran two international cohorts of the Experiment Attractor in partnership with untitled in Helsinki. The Experiment Attractor created a dedicated space and process to imagine, experiment and build new infrastructures and institutions for a transition to a flourishing society. We invited social innovators experimenting with new infrastructures to grow a movement around their experiment. The first cohort spanned the six societal missions while the second cohort focused on community wealth. An assumption we made in designing the Experiment Attractor was that each team would want to run independent experiments to advance their own idea. Instead, we were surprised when the first cohort chose to join forces in a combined experiment, because they realized that while they had different projects, they were working towards a shared future. As a result, we made collaborative experimentation a feature in the second cohort.
I learned from Mission from MaRS that for startups in sectors like cleantech, gaining adoption of their solution is far more complex than for a typical software startup. Cleantech ventures face systemic barriers including lack of customer awareness, lack of standards, outdated regulations, unwieldy procurement, capital-intensive infrastructure requirements, and complex markets. Overcoming these barriers takes a village. Policy-makers, capital providers, suppliers and customers all need to change and innovate too in order to unlock the full potential of cleantech and climate innovation.
I learned from the Emergence Room that transition involves reimagining our relationship with ourselves, each other and nature. The seeds already exist for us to rebuild a just and regenerative society. However, they are not currently receiving the attention, funding or support they need to spread. Our most powerful institutions have been designed with narrow accountabilities and fiduciary duties that inhibit their appetite for deep structural reform. We need new accountabilities to future generations, the earth, our designed world, and to all people to accelerate a just transition.
What’s Next?
Transition can feel more like hurtling off a cliff when you can’t see, touch or feel the new worlds we are transitioning towards. In the coming decade we will experience even greater levels of change and disruption, which will further polarize society. Unchecked, polarization creates balkanization, conflict and paralysis at the very time when we most need bold collective action.
Synthetikos is focused on depolarizing place-based transitions. We want to help changemakers, communities and cities with bold ambitions to create radical change for good that brings people together rather than driving them apart. This will require a kind of innovation that invites participation, builds trust, bridges divisions, embraces context and complexity, continuously explores and experiments, curates desired futures in the present, and creates platforms and movements to scale and spread positive change. I’ll have more to say about this shortly! In the meantime, please add your thoughts in the comments below or connect with me on LinkedIn.
