THUNDER BAY – The Northwestern Ontario Innovation Centre is making it easier for forestry-sector businesses to get up and running in the region.
The centre’s Boreal Springboard program received $1.5 million through the province’s trade-impacted communities program.
The Boreal Springboard project offers an accelerator and a soft-landing program, says Richard Gemmill, executive director of the Northwestern Ontario Innovation Center.
“The funding being announced today is going to help put our program on an even stronger path to success and will build significant momentum for companies who are positioned to scale their forest-based products and technologies in our region,” Gemmill said at a media event this week.
The accelerator program helps entrepreneurs, startups, and existing businesses gather ideas and technologies and turn them into sellable products for the market. The funding will help business access up to $40,000 of seed funding and development support, technical resources, connections to industry partners, and the marketplace.
“Whether that’s finding new uses for our wood and forestry byproducts, improving manufacturing processes, or developing entirely new products, we want to give businesses the support they need to move their ideas forward and bring them to market,” MPP Kevin Holland, associate minister of forestry and forest products, said.
The soft-landing stream is designed to help commercial forestry sector businesses operating outside the region establish their businesses in Northwestern Ontario though access to forest resources, expertise, trade infrastructure or supply chains. They receive hands-on support in navigating the region’s forest-sector ecosystem and planning their investments.
The programs are two more pellets in a “silver buckshot” approach to strengthening the region’s forest sector in the face of U.S. tariffs, Holland said.
The contribution to the innovation centre’s springboard program synergizes with Ontario’s plan to diversify products in the forestry market, while developing the new products associated with forestry and forest biomass, he said.
“It’s going to require a number of new initiatives and new ideas and new products, diversifying markets, diversifying products that we’re creating with the forestry sector and the program and what they’re going to be doing here at the innovation centre ties in very nicely with that work,” Holland said.
This summer the innovation centre saw its first cohort exit the Boral Springboard accelerator program.
“We work with businesses once they’ve been approved as an accelerated participant, or they’ve been approved as a potential soft land. We work with them to develop milestones. So, the funding is dispensed after milestones are met,” Gemmill said.
Bracken said those cohorts signed an agreement laying out a certain number of milestones they must complete throughout the project, and with every milestone comes a check.
“We work with them to determine because each business is going to be different. Each company, each organization is going to have different goals and different bottlenecks that they have to overcome to bring their business to market. So, we work with them to identify those milestones and how we can reward those milestones with some funding,” he said.
