Innovative Projects Realized

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.

Foundational Models for Drug Discovery

A foundation model (FM) is any model that is trained at scale on a broad dataset and can be adapted (e.g., fine-tuned) to a wide range of downstream tasks; current examples include BERT, CLIP and GPT-3. In this project, we investigate the challenges of building foundational models for drug discovery: capturing multi-modal information, explainability, and rapid adaptation to new lab experiments. Addressing these challenges will allow us to build robust foundational models that we can apply to downstream drug discovery tasks. In particular, we seek to leverage these foundational models to learn biochemistry fundamentals from biochemical interaction data. Biochemistry is the central discipline in the discovery of new medicines. Hence, a biochemistry foundational model will have great significance in tasks such as function prediction in proteins, binding prediction in chemical-protein interactions and antibody discovery. We will evaluate our biochemistry foundational model on several biochemistry datasets in the open-source domain.

Developing rapid and portable detection technology for monitoring manganese in drinking water systems

Manganese (Mn) is a contaminant of emerging concern in drinking water as a growing body of epidemiological evidence has identified adverse cognitive, neurodevelopmental and behaviour effects in children. Canada has been a global leader in advancing the regulatory framework for Mn in drinking water, and in 2019, Health Canada published a new drinking water guideline. For the first time, Mn is now regulated on a health-basis (i.e. Alberta and Nova Scotia). The World Health Organization published proposed Mn standards in 2020, with a health-based value, lower than Health Canada’s, providing a powerful policy signal that Mn management will be a new treatment and management priority. Currently Mn monitoring is reliant on periodic grab sampling with analysis by specialized equipment in certified labs. There is no reliable on-site monitoring technique. Our project team at Queen’s University and MANTECH Inc will work together in developing new portable approaches for detecting Mn species.

Titan Platform Marketing Internship

This Marketing Project will be undertaken in order to assess current strategies, improve current processes, and brainstorm new strategies. The successful candidate will first be educated on our industry, our project, and our potential clients by the CEO and CTO. The main goal of this project is to strengthen the marketing (including messaging and branding) of the company, and in an efficient manner. We welcome a candidate whose recent training and energy will bring our company a fresh perspective.

To develop a culture-centric application for a modern matchmaking service

The main project objective is to develop a culture centric matchmaking application that would cater to the unique needs and preferences of African relationship seekers in Canada and diaspora.

Our research showed that the online dating industry (ODI)s does not cater to African relationship seekers’ unique needs and preferences. Only 2% of African respondents stated they had a good experience, while none met anyone seeking a serious relationship while using these western online dating apps. Qunuby aims to fulfil the needs of this heavily underserved market.

The project would include the following streams of activities to ultimately design and build a web and mobile matchmaking application to would cater to the needs of the target market. These activities include:

1. Conduct in-depth research and analysis on the online and offline relationship matching industry: This involves conducting primary and secondary research to re-validate the existing Lean model and marketing strategy before application development.

2. Use knowledge to design an innovative matchmaking application that meets the vision and requirements of the target market: This involves developing prototypes for both web and mobile platforms in line with the research findings and design requirements of the team. In addition, selecting a technology platform would meet the short and long-term needs of the project.

3. Build the solution for web and mobile usage: Develop the software application using the agreed platform.

4. Launch and Testing: conduct testing with a release of the beta II version and champion subsequent lessons learnt and bug management for continuity management