$36M for Smartpark project

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This article was published 02/02/2017 (2836 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The University of Manitoba’s Smartpark is continuing to position itself as a springboard for the province’s innovation sector with a major cash infusion from the federal and provincial governments.

The Smartpark, a 100-acre parcel of land on the U of M’s Fort Garry campus developed with the intention of hosting researchers and technology companies, received $32 million from the federal government and $4 million from the province to build a new Innovation Hub and Stanley Pauley Engineering Building.

The 75,000-square-foot, four-storey Innovation Hub, set to be built at 110 Innovation Dr., will serve multiple purposes, Larry Paskaruk, director of Smartpark said. It will be a common area for the 1,100 researchers and staff working across the 415,000-square-foot campus, and will also become home to a number of emerging science and technology enterprises.

“This all started back in 2002 with building number one,” Paskaruk said. “We went through a period of rapid development with no common areas, so this represents the culmination of those rapid development years.

“The Innovation Hub, its core principal is gathering — gathering the community of innovators, gathering the extended community on campus, and gathering the researchers in the city and across the province,” Paskaruk said.

“The other goal of this project is to commercialize startup companies and accelerate them through the incubation process towards creating new jobs of the future.”

North Forge Technology Exchange will be the Innovation Hub’s primary tenant, Paskaruk said, and will also serve as an incubator for startup companies working in the information-communication, technology, and biotechnology, agriculture and nutriceuticals, and engineering and composite material sectors.

“Students, business people who have ideas and have not the resources for a business plan, marketing, legal — there will be resources to help them accelerate towards commercialization.”

Paskaruk contends the new facility will be an incentive for students and researchers to remain in the province and the diversity of voices under one roof will allow for a cross-pollination of ideas.

“It’s a significant facility for Smartpark and it’s a milestone for us,” Paskaruk said.

Winnipeg South MP Terry Duguid, who was on hand at the university to announce the funding, said this type of investment comes “once in a generation” and is part of the federal government’s strategy to further innovation nation wide.

“We have a major university in the heart of Winnipeg South and I’m very proud of that,” Duguid said. “But we are a centre of innovation and a hub of research.”

“Innovation is going to be creating the jobs of the future and it’s really important to be making these investments. For short term stimulation of the economy, there’s going to be jobs in construction, for engineers and architects, but in the long term it’s going to allow us to train more engineers and allow us to put industry, students, and researchers together at the Innovation Hub to create the products and services of the future in medicine, in information science, software and materials.”

The groundwork for the new Stanley Pauley Engineering Building is already laid and construction is expected to begin shortly. The Innovation Hub, designed by local firm Cibinel Architecture Ltd., is expected to be complete by April 2018.