This building is the heart of so much intellectual property activity– how about if instead we find ways to commercialize it?’ And so, the whole founding of MaRS was based on being a center for convergence and for, you know, the uniting and bringing together of all of the pieces that you need to commercialize technology right, the research from academia, the dollars from Bay Street and the policy f. [...] The gulf between MaRS’ deep bench of sector-specific expertise and the needs of a startup is compounded by the relative weakness of peer-to-peer mentoring networks, the absence of a co-working space, the high cost of rent, and a self-acknowledged lack of community more generally (interviews T16, T27, T28, T30). [...] Formed by local leaders, the organization was precipitated by the failure to attract a Hewlett Packard research facility and inspired by the close relationships between the 9 Later renamed the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation and then rebranded as Invest Ottawa in 2012 27 University of Waterloo and local industry (Julie, 2016).10 OCRI’s initial founders included the Regional Municipality. [...] Five of the region’s largest six firms by employment and six of the top ten by revenue were in the telecommunications sector in 1998 30 (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 1998) and five of the six technology firms which went public after the dot com crash (March Networks, RAM Telecom, Bridgewater Systems, DragonWave, and Mitel) operated in the telecommunications space. [...] In the words of a former OCRI employee: The analogy that I would use is a bad renovation … Rather than just tearing the damn thing down and building a brand-new house, we built a second story and then we built a spot over the garage and then we built up the back and none of it fit together ….
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