Climate Venture Studio entrepreneurship@UBC is helping climate change game-changers fast-forward us to carbon-free

Time is not on our side in the fight against climate change. Around the globe we’ve been more than a day late and a dollar short on investing in climate solutions for years now. Fortunately, the Climate Venture Studio at entrepreneurship@UBC at the University of British Columbia is speeding up the adoption of Canadian-made climate-oriented technological innovations and disruptions that no one can afford to let gather dust.

The Climate Venture Studio, designed to help UBC entrepreneurs get their climate action innovations up and running, emerged as a response to UBC declaring a climate emergency. The Studio’s specific goal is to decrease the time between invention and adoption from a current average of 30 years to 5-10 years.

To get that done, the Climate Venture Studio at entrepreneurship@UBC, formed a working group across research intensive universities in BC. The team, led by Dr.Shannon Bard, a former university professor with deep industry, regulatory and community engagement experience from her work as Global Director of Innovation at Ausenco an international engineering and environmental consultancy, then got down to work. They quickly reached out to those institutions that are hotbeds of climate solution innovation and entrepreneurship and asked innovators, faculties and thought leaders across the University and provincial landscape to identify the key barriers and challenges to accelerating and achieving societal adoption of their advancements.

Once these obstacles had been identified, the Climate Venture Studio team worked to devise some solutions—one of which was drumming up more funding. The Studio spearheaded an advocacy effort to create a united front of innovation and entrepreneurship across all BC research intensive universities. With the support of other ecosystem allies, four BC Ministers were briefed, resulting in an agreement to strike a working group across all four ministries.

These efforts yielded $5M annually in flexible funding from two granting agencies (GenomeBC and Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy). The Studio team, with the support of their working group were able to demonstrate return on investment for early-stage scientist-entrepreneurs and early-stage deep science ventures.

Thanks to the Studio, ventures in the UBC community can join The Climate Venture Studio to leverage the program’s expertise in developing climate-focused advancements. The Climate Venture Studio supports the development of climate solutions in areas including coasts and oceans; energy; mining and minerals; industrial processes; food, agriculture and land use; resilient communities; freshwater; health and education; biodiversity and habitat; bridges and infrastructure; engineered carbon sinks; transportation; and other interdisciplinary initiatives.

The Climate Venture Studio developed an innovative approach to education for the net-zero economy. An advisory board was formed to provide timeline feedback and input to the educational approach all to support the goal of scaling impactful climate ventures now. This advisory board includes regulators from Climate Action Secretariat & Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation; impact investors, granting agencies (Mitacs, Genome BC), cleantech industry and innovators, legal and business community, and innovation thought leaders.

An additional Entrepreneurs in Residence element to the Studio program ensures industry leaders and experts in the field help drive climate ideas to impact. As well, the Climate Venture Studio partnered with Foresight Cleantech Accelerator to annually provide 5 of the most high-potential startups in the Climate Venture Studio with access to Foresight Launch and Deliver programming and mentoring from cleantech subject matter expert Executives-in-Residence. The diverse group of Entrepreneurs-in-Residence and Executives-in-Residence includes several PhDs, scientist-entrepreneurs, people with climate solution subject matter expertise, and others with a wide range of corporate expertise.

The lack of an industry network hinders the extensive customer discovery process needed to test a hypothesis and confirm whether a solution resolves an urgent and important problem better than any competitor for a defined customer. Recognizing this, the Studio stepped up. Their Climate Connections “reverse pitch” monthly event, offers academic ventures a missing piece of the puzzle. This venue gives scientist-entrepreneurs access to industry experts across circular economy, energy, water, carbon, agriculture, and mining, and that gets good things moving.

To address economic reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, the Climate Venture Studio partnered with Indigenous leader Bob Chamberlin to present a series of workshops on developing strategies to partner with remote communities to pilot cleantech addressing energy, water and food insecurity. In an interdisciplinary approach to promote effective storytelling and facilitate smooth societal adoption of cleantech innovation, the Studio partnered with Emily Carr School of Art + Design Professor Bonne Zabolotney to pair cleantech ventures with communication design students to complete a full-term Communication Design for Climate Change class.

Scientist-entrepreneurs have also benefited from partnership with UBC’s Research-Based Theatre initiative, where theatre is used as a method to communicate the impact of research translation and can facilitate the adoption of climate solutions in communities.

An additional benefit of the Climate Venture Studio is that it empowers graduate students and postdocs to create their own jobs via venture building and provide employment for their peers while staying in Canada, thus preventing a brain drain to the global market. In a country where only 1 in 6 postdoctoral fellows are able to secure an academic position, opening doors for other engaging career paths is vital.

With their finely honed understanding of how to best support the unique needs and challenges of deep science ventures and academic founders, the Studio supports team formation. Often, co-founders are recruited directly from the pool of mentors and EIRs. The Climate Venture Studio’s strong reputation is encouraging new researchers to consider an entrepreneurial path as a way to make an impact with their innovation.

Unsurprisingly, given their ASAP mandate, Climate Venture Studio launched fast and began to achieve its goals quickly. While they set a target of decreasing adoption time from 30 to 5 years, through their work with companies Takachar and Arca, carbon was sequestered within a mere 2 years – a success that has earned these innovators acclaim and global prizes.

This Climate Venture model is scalable and has been applied to support dozens of climate solution ventures across the university of BC and the strategy has been shared widely with other BC research intensive universities.

Climate Venture Studio entrepreneurship@UBC is helping climate change game-changers, fast-forwarding us to carbon-free