By Geoff Morgan
A high-tech network of micro-offices sits unassumingly behind the 19th-century façade of a downtown-Toronto heritage building.
The MaRS Incubator is 20,000 square feet of office and wet lab space across two floors in Toronto’s Discovery District. Designed to aid business start-ups, the incubator is truncated into a series of smaller offices that provide new – primarily science- and medical-based – companies affordable rent and access to lab facilities. The minimum size for an office in the incubator is 160 square feet.
Passing by renovations to the heritage Toronto General Hospital on his way to work in a nearby university lab every morning, Jason Sharpe, one of three founders at AXS Biomedical Animation Studios, decided on the MaRS Incubator’s office space as platform to launch a new business.
Sharpe’s studio began as a 300-square foot operation within the incubator in 2005. He calls it “A huge convenience for a company that’s starting out.” For small companies that can’t afford the large and lavish offices hawked by commercial realtors, the incubator provides a convenient place to grow a business in downtown Toronto. “We moved in and the office was set up. We had Internet, phone, desks, lighting, power – we didn’t have to worry about any of that and we could just focus on our business right from the start.”
Right now, there are 20 small businesses renting subsidized office space in the incubator which is part of the larger MaRS Centre – a public-private partnership aimed at connecting science research with the business community. “MaRS itself is a global address, so it gives [small companies] a cachet, a boost, to be located here,” says Linda Quattrin, the centre’s director of communications.
While the MaRS Centre also leases to major players like the Royal Bank of Canada, Quattrin says the highest demand for MaRS space is in the incubator, which fields applications from five to 10 companies at any one time. She says that the incubator is a place where small companies have “accidental collisions” with other start-ups; shared lab space for science firms, shared meeting rooms for service companies and shared kitchen, photocopying and common areas for all give the incubator’s 20 companies ample opportunity to interact.
Sharpe’s studio for instance collaborated with two other incubator clients, Octopz Inc. and Constab Pharmaceuticals Inc., on marketing and visual design. Octopz is a software company and Constab is a science-start up. Sharpe says that AXS’s studio worked with both companies with marketing and to help them visualize their products. He adds, that while “the idea there is to break down silos” MaRS is still learning to encourage the connections between companies in the incubator. “These are science companies; some get in there, put their blinders on and get to work.”
The incubator’s location within the greater MaRS Centre – and MaRS’s complicated network of links with the University of Toronto, city hospitals, government and businesses – gives small companies access to subsidized legal advice, entrepreneurial workshops as well as heavyweight marketing and professional relations, like Buzz Aldrin’s well-publicized visit to MaRS in May. The collection of small tenants within the incubator –as well as the larger blue-chip tenants in the larger complex – collectively forms a larger identity which translates to more visibility for a small company.
“Being in that building gave us instant credibility with clients and potential clients,” Sharpe says. AXS has now outgrown the incubator space at MaRS and had to move into a mid-sized office elsewhere in Toronto. The company has grown to six people and continues to attract new clients, like Splice, a movie starring Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley.
Category: Officeland
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