Dr. Ali Pormohammad, PhD, arrived in Canada from Iran in 2019 to further his research on antimicrobials. Living in a basement apartment, learning English, and trying to make ends meet, he volunteered in a lab by day and worked in a restaurant by night. His friends and family encouraged him to go home and take over his family’s restaurant, but he insisted that he came to Canada to do science. He persevered, finding a postdoctoral position in UCalgary’s Department of Biological Sciences. Here, he developed a new antimicrobial that was more effective than other antibiotics on the market – a breakthrough in the global fight against antimicrobial resistance.

After patenting his discovery, he was encouraged by his supervisor to explore commercialization. As a basic scientist, he wasn’t knowledgeable about innovation and entrepreneurship until he participated in UCalgary’s Evolve to Innovate program, which provided him with the knowledge and skills he needed to commercialize his ground-breaking product. With the support of the UCalgary research ecosystem, Dr. Pormohammad established his company, MHCombiotic Inc. The company aims to bring antibacterial and antibiofilm products to the healthcare, veterinary and agriculture industries, where antimicrobial resistance is a growing problem. The company plans to scale-up to become a global leader in antibiotics.

Over the past three years, Dr. Pormohammad has generated 50 research publications, won numerous awards and scholarships, was named one of Calgary’s ‘Top 40 Under 40’. These days, he lives by a lesson he learned in the toughest days of 2019: “Never lose your hope.”

To ensure entrepreneurship and innovation thrive, enthusiasm and energy are needed from every level. Many people want to be engaged in entrepreneurial activities, but they face the barriers of the traditional structures and processes of academia. Care must be taken to create an environment that encouraged all members of the university to explore their entrepreneurial instincts and be creative in transforming research discovery to practical outcomes. UCalgary has accomplished this by making entrepreneurship and innovation a core theme of all activities of the institution. This is as important as having an effective and functional support ecosystem available.

Strong leadership is necessary to ensure that ambition and audacious objectives are present in the entrepreneurial and innovation space and non-traditional skills are added to the mix. While many universities are strong in terms of their education and research programs, they may lack non-traditional skills, such as invention and the identification of solutions within research results. Specifically addressing these issues through programming and mentorship has produced great results at UCalgary and is a specific learning from our journey.

An effective entrepreneurship ecosystem requires proactive and genuine communication of the excitement inherent in entrepreneurship and innovation. UCalgary has experimented with different approaches and we’ve found success in using digital media to tell the entrepreneurial and innovation stories of our campus members. This approach has helped the institution break free of traditional university messaging and find new ways to engage and communicate through engaging formats, including podcasts, social media and other tools.

At UCalgary we are increasing the scale of our activities. We are expanding our current offerings in entrepreneurial education, engaging the whole university community to activate them into entrepreneurship and innovation. Planning is underway to offer first year required courses in ‘research and creative scholarship’ and ‘entrepreneurial thinking’. We are exploring removing course pre-requisites to allow students open access to courses regardless of their home faculty. This will allow students to come together and learn skills with others from across campus.

To address the barrier of time to create, we are exploring offering micro-credential systems to reward participation in campus led entrepreneurial and innovation activities that address grand challenges such as climate change. This further promotes student participation in first-step innovation programs.

Uniquely, UCalgary has committed significant physical space for entrepreneurship and innovation with the current development of the University Innovation Quarter. This will provide over 76 acres of redeveloped space, including specialized facilities for both STEM and social innovation activities.

Our leadership in the entrepreneurship and innovation space has led to support from federal and provincial governments to be a core actor in launching more effective intellectual-property education and process across Alberta and other parts of Canada through the launch of Elevate IP. This vision is also reflected in our new UCeed Energy fund, which is available to innovators across Canada.

UCalgary is supporting local and international innovators and has the ambition and capability to succeed on the world stage in the years to come.