Innovative Projects Realized

Business Strategy Internship_UAlberta – RES0054306

Fourien is facing negative affects on its manufacturing and sales because of interrupted supply chain in the electronics components. In order to recover from the impact of the pandemic, the company is considering to implement some critical changes in the design of its circuit boards. The transition involves a complex process to evaluate the economics, supply chain of the new parts, feasibility of implementation based on the existing resources of the company and time required to implement new changes. This short internship project will be addressing feasibility of the planned transition to a new design of our circuit boards for our various instruments.

Cherry Health – Finance & Marketing Intern

They will be working closely with the COO to formalize the go-to-market strategy – determining the best course of action to gain sustainable market presence and growth in each of Canada’s unique provincial medical systems outside of Alberta. This will involve a combination of competitor/barrier analysis, evaluating and planning marketing tactics. A component of their responsibility will be to build out the financial projections for each market in preparation to raise investor capital.

Intelligent Scaleable Contest Platform

The proposed research is to investigate and prototype an intelligent architecture for the MemeLabs contest platform that will support advanced features such as multi-layer access control, scaleable design, and to explore innovative mechanisms such as generation and embedding a watermark in shared media of both photo and video. The project is important in the company’s development of an innovative new intelligent contest platform to increase its competitive ability in the global marketplace.

Merchant Equities Capital Corp – Administration Assistant

Pursuant to a management consulting contract MECC will be advancing Renewable U’s Joint Venture initiatives to build four renewable diesel facilities. The successful candidate will help MECC by working on economic business models and feasibility reports. This will benefit MECC’s ability to continue expanding its operations as it relates to Renewable U and the growing renewable diesel marketplace. In addition to this, the intern will help conduct research for the numerous companies MECC provides consulting and advisory services for, and will assist in the completion of administrative work.

Épi’Fanny – FSA UL

Épi’Fanny est une boulangerie artisanale de tradition française située sur la rue Saint-Jean dans le quartier Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Sa situation géographique stratégique, sur l’une des rues les plus passantes de Québec, et sa grande vitrine lui permettent d’attirer de nombreux passants en son sein. Ainsi, une bonne partie de sa clientèle, avant la pandémie, était constituée de passants, de touristes ainsi que de travailleurs des commerces et des entreprises aux alentours. Avec le COVID-19, les touristes et les passants se font plus rares, de nombreux commerces ont fermé et les capacités des bureaux sont limitées à 25%. Les revenus de l’entreprise ont donc diminué. Par ailleurs, la fermeture de nombreux commerces crée des opportunités pour d’autres, et de nouvelles boulangeries ont ainsi ouvert leurs portes sur la rue. Il nous faut donc redéfinir notre modèle d’affaires et notre politique des ressources humaines afin qu’ils soient mieux adaptés au contexte actuel et à la nouvelle structure de notre clientèle. Le stagiaire sera donc chargé de revoir notre modèle d’affaires innovant, notre offre de produits et notre politique de prix, notre plan d’affaires, de même que notre politique relative aux ressources humaines.

Business Strategy Development at Pharmaceutical Sciences Group

Explain the current state of the partner organization with reference to relevant prior work and/or company business plan.

As a neutral platform serving pharmaceutical professionals since 1971, the National Pharmaceutical Sciences Group (PSG) is dedicated to the advancement of the pharmaceutical industry through the training and development of its members through a host of services including in person and online training workshops, large scale conferences, career fairs, free seminars & networking events. They maintain strong relationships with the North American regulating bodies as well as affiliate provincial organizations- both of whom they routinely collaborate with to deliver valuable content to industry.

In the past, the PSG has delivered successful workshops on the topic of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) to both those coming into industry as well as those who have been working in the industry for several years.

BI Expertise – FSA UL

BI Expertise aide les entreprises à intégrer les technologies d’intelligence artificielle et ainsi à préparer le monde de demain. Nos clients sont nos partenaires: nous travaillons ensemble pour leur permettre de s’assurer un avantage compétitif durable grâce à des solutions personnalisées à leurs besoins. À la suite du contexte de pandémie, BI Expertise a recentré l’essentiel de ses efforts sur ses projets de recherche et innovation collaborative. Cela a abouti à la production de plusieurs preuves de concept pouvant servir de base à la création de nouvelles activités dédiées au développement et à la commercialisation de ces solutions. Le stagiaire pourra appuyer la direction dans l’élaboration d’une stratégie à cette fin. Il participera de différentes manières à nos activités, entre autres : – Définir un modèle d’affaires pertinent; – Identifier des véhicules de financement; – Réaliser un portrait de la chaîne de valeur et des parties prenantes; – Préparer la planification stratégique et des scénarii prospectifs; – Réaliser des analyses de marché et identifier les marchés clefs pour la commercialisation; – Préparer les outils marketing pertinents; – Identifier les partenaires clefs; – Préparer un échéancier de mise en œuvre; – Contribuer à l’amélioration continue des processus de travail.

Developing Gaze and Movement Key Performance Indicators for User Experience Assessment

There’s nothing quite as delightful as using a well-designed product, especially a piece of software. A field of research known as User eXperience (UX) tries to define measures that describe what a good design feels like. While conventional measures of UX for software work well (how long things take, whether you complete your task successfully), we suggest that tracking your eye and hands will reveal other useful information. These easy-to-get measures, which we call Gaze and Movement Assessment Key Performance Indicators (GaMA KPI), are calculated from where the eyes look, how the hand moves and their coordination, to tell us how the user’s experience is going. We have designed a task that is similar to a menu system that someone might find in a typical video game. Users interact with the menu while we record both their gaze and hand positions throughout. We have found promising KPIs that are novel and only possible to generate using gaze and movement data. We hope to continue data collection to generate new, more advanced KPIs, that tell us more detailed information about the user’s experience.

Kensington Health

Responsibilities:
-Development of operational plans for the opening of the new Hospice space
-Development of strategic and operational plans for long-term care facility to leverage digital health solutions to improve presence of specialized care on site and to minimize need for hospital transfers
-Development of strategic plan to increase virtual care options for ambulatory clinics
-Depending on timing of rollout, leading critical elements of COVID vaccine distribution planning to our partners through the Mid-West Toronto OHT
Significance:
-Significant contributions to Kensington Health in the form of creating sustainable business models for all of our entities through the end of the pandemic and in the post-pandemic landscape
-Enhanced care options for all of our residents, clients and patients based on the opportunities that were illuminated through pandemic (ie. virtual care)
-Equitable and accessible COVID-19 vaccine distribution to the structurally vulnerable members of our population
-Challenges addressed: financial viability of our organization; minimizing wait times (exacerbated by pandemic) for important tests and surgeries; efficient rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine

Counting those experiencing homelessness in the CBRM during a pandemic: A service-based count

Small and rural areas are often disproportionately under-represented in the distribution of funds or access to resources, making it extremely valuable to have robust, current data to reflect the needs of these communities in order to advocate for funding or supports. COVID-19 has demonstrated the fragility of our current systems by impacting our capacity to collect this type of data in the face of a pandemic, despite the overwhelming impression that this information on social and health indicators (such as number of people who are experiencing homelessness) is even more important at times like this. Developing ways to reduce the burden on community organizations, while streamlining the processes required for data collection, analysis, and reporting, is essential.

This project supports the important effort to enumerate homelessness (as a health and social indicator) in the CBRM, where homelessness is often hidden. This project supports a service-based count of homelessness in the CBRM which will provide essential data on the current impact of COVID-19 on the local burden of homelessness. It will include the important objective to develop a plan for more sustainable data collection and reporting that is community-centered, community-accessible, and community-relevant.

Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids – Social Enterprise Coordinator

Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids (BB4CK) is exploring opportunities to launch a social enterprise program, an effort to offer services in our community while producing some revenue to fund operations. This project will lead the building of a business plan, including researching social enterprise structures, performing environmental and competitive analysis, and outlining priorities and budgets.

ParkChamp – Marketing Coordinator

The Sales/Marketing coordinator will assist in organizing and executing new marketing campaigns and communication tactics to help support ParkChamp’s growth. Interns will be responsible for supporting the sales and marketing team with presentation material, proposals, social media, blogging, lead generation. This will help ParkChamp be a more active service provider for our current customers, better understand our customers and get more traction from new ones.