Is MaRS really almost as bright as the Sun?

6 responses

  1. What a farce. Clearly these figures can not be substantiated. It is beyond sloppy, I’d call it egregious, others might go so far as to say criminal. For a non-profit (financed primarily by the province), there sure are a lot of people at MaRS making a mint… and I’m not referring to MaRS clients.

    That the MaRS website co-mingles ‘clients’ with ‘tenants’ is telling. Perhaps in the next report calculating the initiative’s economic impact MaRS can sum up the featured tenants (Glaxo, Etsy, Merck, RBC, Songza) market capitalizations and head counts… easily hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs created.

  2. Ian Graham says:

    We are on the same page Mark.

    I posted some thoughts on “Ontario’s Innovation elephant in the room” here – http://bit.ly/1jRaiZG

  3. nigel stokes says:

    To put it succinctly, MaRs usually feeds the Turkey’s and shoots the Eagles. Time to trim the largess.

  4. Bryan Kerdman says:

    So we now know that MaRS and Mr. Hudak use the same flawed calculator.

  5. Omar El-ahrairah says:

    The outrageous claims being made by or on behalf of MaRS works something like this. It’s based on the principle of flawed attribution. For example, a Toronto-based start-up that had a financially impressive exit a few years back — if you followed the MaRS media thread — was “claimed” as a MaRS success story. I personally knew one of the co-founders of said company, and being curious I asked what precisely MaRS did to contribute towards their success. And here’s what he said: “I attended an Entrepreneurship 101 course sometime ago”. Therein lies the “flawed attribution” I suspect leads to the inflated impacts claimed by MaRS. No matter how insignificant the relationship a startup company has had with MaRS (attended a workshop, conference, an introductory meeting with an EIR, etc), MaRS will lay claim to any successful outcome that said startup will perhaps realize in the future.

  6. jlin says:

    The entrepreneurial education component, at least some part of it, refers to the excellent series that Mars runs: The Entrepreneurial 101 workshops.

    It’s got a great course design, and is organized around a year’s cohort – there is about 30 hours of instruction per year. Of course, people drop in and out of these sessions, but they are all online.

    It’s a worthy resource for people wanting to know more about entrepreneurship, as there are interviews, QA’s with startup founders as well as the traditional “classroom” structured lessons.

    I attended two of these sessions, and watched many of the videos, so I’m a learner/participant that benefited from the Mars’ educational initiatives.

    If you want to know more,

    http://www.marsdd.com/entrepreneurship-101/

    and

    http://www.marsdd.com/app/uploads/2014/04/Ent101_Printable-Schedule-for-Attendees3.pdf for the last season so you can see what the structure is like.

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