Projets novateurs réalisés

Correlating Manager Interpersonal Skills with Team Psychological Safety

Psychological safety has been consistently linked to positive workplace outcomes, including increased team learning and task performance (Edmondson, 1999; Newman et al., 2017). Previous research focusing on the development of psychological safety has identified several of its antecedents (Frazier et al., 2017). For instance, leaders have been found to play a critical role in shaping the psychological safety climate within the work teams (Nemanich & Vera, 2009; Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006). However, fewer studies have explored what aspects of positive leadership are beneficial for fostering psychological safety. Thus, the current study draws upon theory and research in counselling psychology to explore the role of leaders’ interpersonal skills in building team psychological safety. Specifically, leaders’ facilitative interpersonal skills (FIS; Anderson et al., 1999), the skills in facilitating interpersonal processes especially in challenging situations, are expected to correlate positively with psychological safety. Anderson et al. (1999, 2009) have developed and validated a performance-based measure of therapist FIS and found that FIS was associated with positive client outcomes. The current research aims to modify and validate an FIS measure for leaders and to explore the relationship between FIS and team psychological safety.

iTel Prime Automation Portal

iTel has built the largest business internet, voice, and data footprint in Canada. We can create cost-effective network solutions anywhere our clients do business – even in the most remote locations across the country. iTel’s mission is to help businesses do more by connecting workplaces anywhere. The overall project aligns with iTel’s mission because it will solve issues experienced by organizations in Canada including low availability of bandwidth in remote locations, unreliable service, packet loss, high cost of bandwidth, security issues, the need to use multiple providers, lack of service control, and slow/delayed deployments and support.
The project is part of a solution called iTel Prime Automation Portal. It will focus on building additional functionality and enhancements to the current development already built for the platform. The platform orchestrates and automates various components and will be extended to provide Hardware Integration, Hardware Reporting/Monitoring and Hardware Automation. iTel’s Prime Automation Portal project is positioned to drastically improve the ease of configuration and monitoring of components for a wide variety of hardware. Upon completion, a customer will be able to quickly control and monitor the deployed hardware for their sites while in the background the automation will use the self-tuning algorithm to achieve the best results. As a result, the automation will be able to tweak bandwidth parameters as needed and automatically configure and monitor the hardware elements involved. This solution will be capable of automating network turn-ups and provide users with an easy to use interface to monitor it all.

Financial and Organizational Innovative Systems Implementation

The past two years have shown increasing distrust through online division, polarizing protests and strikes, and destructive riots. This problem has gotten worse due to our unverified, disorganized, and time consuming citizen and stakeholder engagement systems, especially social media, focus groups and town halls, and voting. In order to solve the problem of increasing distrust Veras Technologies Inc. is working on creating a verified citizen and stakeholder engagement platform that provides verified, targeted, organized, and ongoing proactive engagement. As Veras grows its users and customers, the company needs to ensure that strong operations, organization systems, and processes are in place so the company can accommodate future growth. Veras will work with intern Ali Khatib to audit, implement, and integrate automatic financial, operational, and organizational systems throughout the company. First, the intern will audit the existing systems and processes to identify vulnerabilities and automation opportunities. Second, the intern will implement innovative systems to help the company scale. Third, the intern will maintain and update these systems. Veras hopes to use this project to audit, implement, and integrate automatic financial, operational, and organizational systems throughout the company to prepare them for user and customer growth. The intern hopes to utilize this project to grow his technical, professional, and interdisciplinary skills that will provide himself a professional work environment foundation to advance the transferable skills needed to have a successful career after post-secondary graduation.

Detecting Anomalies in Fee Schedule Assignments

Fee calculation engine is a tool that is utilized for fee assignment of the investors in financial advisory companies. The assigned fees for the clients can be miscalculated by the advisors. An AI-based monitoring system can reduce the mistakes in the fee calculation by comparing a new assessed fee with the previous assignment. To this end, we aim to build an AL-based anomaly detection system for detecting outliers in the fee evaluation process. This system extracts the patterns in previous fee assessment tasks and compares the new fee assignment duties with these patterns. If the assessed fee value is not compatible with the extracted patterns, the system will set an alarm for subject matter experts to reconsider the calculation and correct the possible mistakes. This system leverages machine learning teqniques and data analytic methods to provide such an anomaly detection mechanism.

Sales and Marketing Process Innovation and Product Improvement for 3D preclinical in vivo Image Analysis Software

MediLumine Inc. is a Montreal-based biotech company dedicated to the sale of 3D in vivo imaging contrast reagents and corresponding image analysis software. MediLumine is seeking to innovate their marketing strategies by developing an effective customer interaction network to allow for improved customer satisfaction and retention. As business moves towards a more virtual and automated format, MediLumine is seeking to innovate its CRM processes with the goal of streamlining customer interactions and driving sales. Throughout the internship, the student will explore new markets and provide recommendations for product/process improvement through consistent assessment of customer satisfaction within the scientific community, develop and implement a CRM process with marketing automation, and develop new innovative marketing strategies. This unique experience will allow the intern to gain skills in biotech applied sciences as well as working at the intersection of business and biotech.

Support to develop and implement business strategy for a global online knowledge learning hub to national development banks – IFCL

International Financial Consulting Ltd. (IFCL) is a leading Canadian consultancy, well established in enhancing development finance in Canada and globally through strategy work, particularly with National Development Banks (NDBs). Our partnership with Mitacs and McGill University to support a Business Strategy Internship would allow us to innovate and refine our current business model, marketing approach as well as core services (e.g., virtual training, knowledge exchange) of the CENDB. Our ultimate vision is to enable CENBD to transition from a incipient project to a self-sustaining entity. We have piloted the centre’s work with several clients including recent regional trainings in Caribbean and Pacific Island development finance institutions (DFIs) as well as the Development Bank of Zambia among others, to great success. However, we require greater clarity regarding our business model to support the scaling up of the centre’s work and development impact to more countries and institutions. A business intern would bring their knowledge and experience to support us in embedding innovation throughout our centre’s work as well as developing a strategic business plan to lay the foundations of the centre’s short to medium term activities and goals.

Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Structured Representation

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have enabled incredible breakthroughs on a wide variety of problems in which computer systems are required to learn through interacting with the environment with no or minimal human intervention. An example of this is DeepMind’s AlphaGo agent, which taught itself to play Go at a superhuman performance. Deep RL has also been applied to robotics, where robotic arms manipulate and transport objects to desired final states guided by the raw images captured by onboard cameras. However, most of the existing research focuses on interacting with a limited set of rigid objects, whereas robotic systems deployed in real life need to manipulate a wide range of objects with different material and inertial properties. To close the gap between theory and practice, we propose to reinforcement learning model that can understand different material and dynamical properties of objects and to use that information to facilitate decision making. We hope that such an architecture would enable the agent to robustly manipulate a wide variety of materials and objects.

The Role of Public Participation in Identifying Stakeholder Synergies in Renewable Energy Project Development: the Case Study of Ontario, Canada

Over the past several decades, the scope of decision-making in the public domain has changed from a focus on unilateral regulatory verdicts to a more comprehensive process that engages all stakeholders. Consequently, there has been a distinct increase in public participation in the environmental decision-making process. While the potential benefits of public engagement are substantial in terms of identifying synergies between public and industry stakeholders that encourage project development, this participation does not come without its challenges. To meet global energy demands and fulfill ambitious targets for greenhouse gas reduction, renewable energy has received increased attention as a feasible alternative to non-renewable electrical generation. However, current literature on renewable energy highlights potential technological, economic, social, or public barriers to renewable energy investment. This research provides a case study of the Ontario, Canada renewable energy generation market and identifies the facilitators and constrainers that affected public input to renewable energy project development in this Province and to provide guidance for developers on improving public consultation in the renewable energy project development decision-making process.

Collaboration Service Model

The knowledge about crop health and irrigation efficiency is highly beneficial for agricultural producers especially when facing challenges arising from climatic pressures. Unfortunately, current solutions designed to effectively manage inputs at a farm are mostly exclusive to large producers because of the operation scale and prohibitive technology cost. We intend to develop a collaborative governance structure that will enable small agricultural producers in the Kootenay Boundary region to utilize a traditionally expensive technology and harness its benefits to maximize crop yields.

Penser et développer un Écosystème régional d’innovation au Québec : La planification stratégique d’un programme d’innovation à l’échelle régionale

L’équipe de Stratégies Grenier offre son expertise aux décideurs politiques, aux leaders communautaires, aux dirigeants économiques et aux entrepreneurs québécois, canadiens et d’ailleurs afin de réaliser leurs grandes idées.
En 2021, l’équipe de Grenier Stratégies fonde le Forum Innovation, un réseau collaboratif voué à la promotion et à la diffusion de la culture de l’innovation au Québec et ailleurs. Les membres du Forum Innovation et partenaires de Grenier Stratégies expriment régulièrement des besoins d’expertise, notamment en lien avec la planification de programmes d’innovation ouverte à l’échelle de leur ville ou de leur région. L’élaboration de tels programmes d’innovation est toujours un défi complexe, qui nécessite de mobiliser des experts, un grand nombre de parties prenantes établies sur le territoire et diverses méthodes de collecte d’information de concertation et de validation des orientations adoptées.
Il est essentiel pour l’équipe de Grenier Stratégies d’orienter les clients et les partenaires de manière efficace et constructive, notamment pour que les démarches de planification de programmes d’innovation ouverte génère une large adhésion et soit l’occasion de diffuser une culture d’innovation dans les organisations concernées.
Le projet proposé permettra d’approfondir nos connaissances sur les méthodes utilisées pour mettre en œuvre de telle démarches, de systématiser nos approches et de tester celles-ci dans un contexte pratique d’application.

Génération automatique de modèles de couronnes dentaires à partir des scans oraux

Une des tâches les plus exigeantes pour les techniciens en conception et fabrication assistée par ordinateur est la création de modèles anatomiques 3D spécifiques à chaque patient. En effet, les techniciens doivent traiter manuellement les scans volumétriques de la bouche des patients pour extraire les modèles 3D des dents existantes et concevoir les dents manquantes. Pour cela, les techniciens utilisent des logiciels de CAD (conception assistée par ordinateur) spécialisés qui traduisent les scans oraux en surfaces tridimensionnelles et permettent l’édition manuelle de ces surfaces, de sorte à pouvoir concevoir de nouvelles dents à fabriquer.
La tâche principale des candidats sera de générer des données d’entraînement qui permettront d’améliorer la précision de notre système de segmentation et d’identification des dents. Dans un premier temps, il s’agira de permettre à notre système de localiser des scans partiels dans une morphologie complète afin d’initialiser l’algorithme de détection dans les meilleures conditions possibles. Dans un deuxième temps, il s’agira de raffiner la précision de segmentation de l’algorithme en constituant une base de données importante de scans partiels.

Aurora Heat North America Expansion Project

Aurora Heat is an Indigenous and female-led organization that offers a variety of natural and reusable hand, foot, and body warmers. Since 2015, these wholly biodegradable warmers have captured the heart of customers looking to replace single-use and chemical-based products that are harmful to the environment.

With thousands of customers across Canada, it has also become evident that many find meaning in purchasing these products as a step in their journey towards reconciliation. There is a marked appreciation for the history of the beaver fur trade in Canada and an Indigenous product that supports Indigenous women and girls in the remote community of Fort Smith. Partnered with the Genuine Mackenzie Valley Fur Program, Aurora Heat’s furs are 100% wild, ethically sourced, and preserve the cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples.

Aurora Heat is at an exciting stage of growth in Canadian and US markets; and would greatly benefit from additional talent. From May – August 2021, Aurora Heat gained considerable value from the research and tactical support from Lianne Adair who is an Indigenous student at the Sauder School of Business and a visiting student at the University of Saskatchewan. During this internship, we’re looking to have her work alongside Aurora Heat’s Head of Revenue & Operations to develop, launch and manage an affiliate marketing program for Canada and the US.