Empowering new innovation commercialization opportunities in Manitoba

May 02, 2023

Guelph/Brandon, – Bioenterprise, Canada’s Food & Agri-Tech Engine, is expanding its footprint in Manitoba by welcoming Brandon University as its newest Knowledge & Development Partner. The two organizations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to empower and support new commercialization opportunities for start-ups and growth-oriented companies in Manitoba’s food and agriculture sector.

For Bioenterprise Canada and its national partners, members and service providers, the MOU with Brandon University represents the potential for new collaborations and partnership in Manitoba. Brandon University faculty, innovation partners and other stakeholders will gain access to the expertise, mentorship, funding and support opportunities available through Bioenterprise’s Canada-wide network.

“We are excited to be expanding our ability to support food and agri-tech sector innovation in Manitoba through this new partnership with Brandon University,” says Dave Smardon, CEO, Bioenterprise Canada. “Manitoba has a strong ag innovation ecosystem, and we look forward to helping start-ups and companies in the province meet or even exceed their growth goals.”

Brandon University has a strong culture of research and innovation from basic and applied research through to art creations and music composition. Through the new partnership with Bioenterprise, the institution is hoping to realize a broader scope for research opportunities, including innovations in food technology, agriculture, and agri-tech, and have greater involvement in community-university-industry collaborations and advancing agricultural commercialization initiatives.

“The Bioenterprise mandate is closely related to the key values of Brandon University, and we are excited to be part of their agriculture and agri-food commercialization network,” says Dr. Heather Duncan, Associate President (Research) at Brandon University. “We look forward to a collaborative partnership that will be mutually beneficial and utilize our researchers’ expertise while exposing them to new opportunities and innovations in the food and agri-tech industry.”

Source : Bioenterprises.ca

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids