MaRS Discovery District has hired corporate finance and investment veteran Alison Nankivell as its next chief executive officer.
Ms. Nankivell, now senior vice-president, fund investments and global scaling for Business Development Bank of Canada’s venture capital unit, will succeed Yung Wu in March as leader of the non-profit organization that calls itself North America’s largest urban innovation hub.
MaRS has 200 employees and occupies 1½ million square feet on downtown Toronto’s hospital row and 55,000 square feet at a Waterfront Toronto building. It has 120 tenants including startups, venture capitalists and foreign multinational giants, and provides advisory services to startups building health and climate technologies.
MaRS, which receives two-thirds of its $30-million in revenue from provincial and federal grants, has faced controversy over its real estate and questions about its sprawling mandate and effectiveness in helping Canadian tech startups scale up into large economic contributors.
The organization is chaired by Annette Verschuren, who resigned last month as chair of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the federal clean technology financier, after the federal ethics commissioner announced a probe into her role in providing $38-million in COVID-19 relief funding for SDTC clients, including NRStor Inc., an energy storage company she leads. NRStor also has a commercial relationship with MaRS, renting space at its building and receiving advisory support through the federally funded Momentum at MaRS program.
“MaRS needs to legally and structurally decide whether it’s a real estate for-profit play or an agency hoping to stimulate innovation,” said Dan Breznitz, co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. “This inability to decide what it is has led it to its current predicament and long history of unfulfilled very expensive promises to the taxpayers of Ontario. It is a legacy that must be changed.”
Ms. Nankivell, whose BDC office is in the MaRS building, said in an interview, “I don’t think anything significantly needs foundational change” at MaRS, disputing the assertion that the organization has been anything but successful. “It’s about reading the signals of the direction that the market is going as the Canadian innovation ecosystem continues to mature and finding those parts where MaRS needs to be more prominent or relevant. It’s more of a nudging of certain aspects of the overall programming and partnership within the community in certain directions of emphasis. That just makes more sense at this juncture.”
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Ms. Nankivell has held several senior roles with BDC Capital over the past 10 years and oversaw the establishment of a federal government plan to fund the venture capital industry a decade ago, which BDC manages along with two similar follow-up schemes. She previously managed private equity fund relationships for Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and another federal Crown corporation, Export Development Canada, where she worked for 15 years. She has been a prominent voice within the venture capital community in pushing for more diversity, equity and inclusion among leaders of private funds and recipients of financing, although BDC itself has spun out funds dominated by male investors.
In a statement, MaRS vice-chair Claudette McGowan said the board is “confident Alison and the team will usher in a new era of innovation and growth” at MaRS. “Her vision aligns seamlessly with MaRS’ goals, and we look forward to the transformative impact she will have on our organization and the innovation community at large.”
MaRS started as the latest in a decades-long effort to help bring inventions from the University of Toronto to market after the sale of its vaccine production business Connaught Labs in 1972. The University of Toronto Innovations Foundation, launched in the 1980s, aimed to encourage on-campus researchers and professors to take their intellectual property to market, but a university panel in 2004 concluded it was not living up to its mandate and recommended its dismantling and that the institution instead partner with MaRS.
By that point MaRS, founded in 2000, was in its infancy. It was the brainchild of John Evans, ex-chairman of Canada’s first biotechnology company, Allelix Biopharmaceuticals. MaRS originally stood for Medical and Related Sciences and was inspired by Kendall Square, Boston’s biotechnology cluster. The group set out to build a tower on property bought from the University Health Network, but its U.S. development partner bailed after the 2008-09 financial crisis and the province had to step in to complete the project, which drew the ire of the auditor-general.
The organization in 2005 shortened its name to MaRS Discovery District and expanded its support to startups across all areas of technology and started a venture capital fund called MaRS IAF.
MaRS along with other provincially funded startup hubs have sought to re-establish their relevance in recent years as regional economic stimulators after Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government began scrutinizing their effectiveness.
Sean Silcoff