Meet Karen Sievewright, managing director of U of T’s new entrepreneurship hub

When Karen Sievewright moved into her new office in the Best Building on College Street in early November, she discovered an old bottle of white wine. “It was so old it had turned brandy coloured,” she recalled.

Sievewright, the managing director of U of T’s new entrepreneurship hub, the Banting & Best Centre, likes to think the bottle was left by one of the many University of Toronto innovators and entrepreneurs who have occupied the building – and its neighbour, the Banting Building – over the years.

The two buildings, she points out, were named after two of U of T’s most illustrious innovators, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, who co-discovered insulin along with J.J.R. Macleod and James Collip.

“These two buildings have such a rich history of innovation over the years,” she says. “They’ve housed so many budding entrepreneurs, early stage tech companies, research labs and funding organizations.”

And now, she says, her goal is to encourage and foster the innovative spirit that drove Banting and Best in the next generation of U of T students and faculty.

With seven business incubators and more than 50 courses, programs, labs and clubs devoted to entrepreneurship, U of T already offers a wide variety of choices for students and faculty with an entrepreneurial bent. In fact, U of T consistently ranks first in North America for number of start-up companies launched. (Visit www.entrepreneurs.utoronto.ca to learn more about entrepreneurship at U of T.)

Sievewright wants to amplify the effect of those many offerings, and to help students and faculty navigate through U of T’s complex entrepreneurship ecosystem and translate their ideas into commercial products and services.

To achieve that, she’ll work with existing incubators, such as the Impact Centre, the Creative Destruction Lab, UTest and the Entrepreneurship Hatchery. A central web calendar for entrepreneurial events, a university-wide entrepreneurship fair, better measurement tools and helping budding entrepreneurs find mentors are also among her goals for the new centre.

“My job is really about getting folks to the table so that they can look at what the other entrepreneurship incubators are doing, so the university as a whole can talk about all the activities that are going on.”

Sievewright notes that U of T is already doing a great job of fostering entrepreneurship. “The proof is in the pudding; there are a great number of entrepreneurs who choose to come here from other universities because they see the access they get to great researchers, great prototype facilities and great mentors.”

Sievewright feels that all students – not only those who want to start their own companies – could benefit from U of T’s entrepreneurial culture.

“Students don’t graduate into a job anymore. They’ll have many careers in their lifetime. They may be in a small organization or a larger one, but regardless, they’ll need some entrepreneurial spirit to move forward. Exposing students to entrepreneurship is not necessarily about creating start-ups. It’s about imparting that flexibility to move forward. That’s what excites me.”