Annual public meeting

Sylvain Charbonneau: I would like to introduce you to Lianna Genovese and Cliff van der Linden. Lianna is the founder of ImagineAble Solutions, a company that develops communication, recreation, and rehabilitation technologies that empower people with disabilities to live the lives they imagine. She started on her path toward entrepreneurship when she was still an engineering student at McMaster University.

Cliff is founder of Vox Pop Labs a company that builds data-driven applications and is best known for producing Vote Compass, a public policy literacy tool used by tens of millions of people during election campaigns worldwide. He is an associate professor in the department of Political Science at McMaster University, where he also serves as the inaugural academic director of the Master of public policy program and the digital society lab. Welcome, Lianna and Cliff.

I would like to invite you both to start by introducing yourself. Maybe starting with you, Lianna. Maybe tell the audience, where did you attend post-secondary school? What did you study? What inspired you to apply your research and transform it into a business, and maybe say a few words about your company, and what is its impact.

Lianna Genovese: Thank you so much for having me. It's quite an honor, so I'll introduce myself and share a little bit more about ImaginAble Solutions. I'm Lianna, the CEO and founder of ImaginAble Solutions. We create assistive technology to improve the quality of life for children and adults with disabilities. My background is biomedical and mechanical engineering. I attended university at McMaster University, where in my 1st year I met Alyssa, a woman with cerebral palsy, who loved to paint, but as her condition progressed she lost the ability to hold a paintbrush, so she had spasticity in her hand. Hand and arm weakness that didn't enable her to do everyday tasks that others might take for granted, and one of her passions being painting. She was stripped away of her passion because of something that was not in her control. So, as part of my 1st year school project, we were tasked to go out and design something for an individual to make their life better.

I wanted to help my friend Alyssa paint again. The 1st prototype was made out of pipe, cleaner straws and a sponge. I included Alyssa throughout the entire design process, and finally created her a device that we call Guided Hands that enabled her to paint again, and seeing her light up as she painted inspired me to continue to see how many other Alyssa's I could help and that kind of took me into the biomedical engineer turned entrepreneurship route, and I'll maybe pause there to go into a little bit more about my business later, but Guided Hands is now used across 23 countries, in schools, hospitals, allowing children and adults with limited hand mobility to not only paint, but to write, to draw, to access ipads, touchscreen devices, communication devices, especially for those who are nonverbal.

And yeah, we're just super excited to make a really amazing social impact. And we couldn't have done it without support from CFI. They really helped us purchase our equipment. We are a proud made in Hamilton, Ontario product. We're actually in-house at the McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute, which is tied to McMaster, of course, and they've been helping us with all of our product developments. They helped purchase all of our 3D printers to, again, manufacture in house, and to really allow our company to have that tailored approach to creating technology for our disability community.

Charbonneau: Thank you, Lianna. What about you, Cliff.

Cliff van der Linden: So, I attended. My undergraduate training is actually from McMaster University, where I'm now based again as a faculty member but my doctoral training was at the University of Toronto. I studied political science. But specifically, I'm a computational social scientist by training. So I work largely with large volumes of data and applying statistical methodologies to try and better understand political behavior.

I was inspired to, or my work is inspired by, really the perceived deficit in informed voting, which is a classic subject in political science that people will often vote without having a full view or full information about the policies of the parties or candidates for whom they vote. And this seemed like a problem to which technology was particularly well suited. Digital technology was particularly well suited. I launched the 1st Vote Compass initiative in 2011 during the Canadian Federal election, and at that time you had a lot of, like Buzzfeed quizzes - which Disney character are you? Or things like that? And these things were random number generators, basically. But they were very popular. A lot of people used them. It became a whole Buzzfeed business model in some sense. And I thought, well, we can take the attraction of that personalized quiz, but make it meaningful and substantive, and bring robust methodologies to bear and actually help people navigate the policy landscape in a fun and accessible way that will make them a more informed and thus an empowered voter on election day. So that was the impetus for Vote Compass. It was meant to be a one-off project during the Canadian Federal election. We were very lucky that CBC Radio Canada agreed to take on the project and incorporate it into their election offerings, but within 5 weeks a tool that we thought would maybe be used by a few 1,000 people, was used by 2 million Canadians during the election campaign. And so that became the launching point for what became an international phenomenon.

We've worked with dozens of public and private broadcasters all over the world, bringing Vote Compass to elections, almost a hundred elections over the past 15 years and some 35 million voters. So in terms of impact, we hope that we've been able to do is motivate and catalyze a more engaged and informed electorate around the world, and we have empirical evidence to demonstrate that the use of our tools increases the probability to vote. It increases voter turnout, and it increases political knowledge when people go to the ballot box. For us, that's a meaningful and validating impact.

Charbonneau: Thank you, Cliff, for this. I'm sure that many members in the audience will be wondering how you identified the potential for commercial pursuit from the research you did in the lab. Maybe we can start with you, Lianna. And then, following with Cliff.

Genovese: So, I was just on a mission to help my friend and to help others like her. I actually got a manufacturing engineering co-op here at McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute and they hired me for a very unique position. Half the day I was testing the lifespan of dental implants and the other half of the day they actually, well, in my interview I guess they saw the potential of my product and they said, “Lianna, we're going to hire you to develop your prototype out into a finalized device.” So, I actually had the ability to use all of the machinery behind me. CNC Machines, really awesome 3D Printers, to finalize Guided Hands into a product that I could then, you know, show to other people. So I ended up creating a new version and I went out into the Hamilton community. I didn't have a car, so I took the bus, put Guided Hands, our product in a garbage bag, since that was the only bag I could find, and I took the bus across Hamilton, walked up to nursing homes, retirement homes, hospitals and did the grand reveal of taking it out of this garbage bag and introducing it to all of these health professionals and people in our community. I saw the reaction on people's faces, children's and adults, as they use Guided Hands for the first time, painting, writing, drawing, expressing themselves, being independent for the first time.

And, I met this little girl named Bella. She has cerebral palsy, and I got her to use Guided Hands, and she had the biggest smile spread across her face as she painted. Then she used a pen to write, used her iPad to play a game, and she turned to her mom and said, “Mom, I want one”. And her mom turned to me and asked, “How much is it?”

And at that point the thought of selling this device never crossed my mind. This was just a passion project of mine. But in that moment, I realized that I had created something that could impact someone's life.

So I went back to my co-op supervisor at the time, who is now our manufacturing advisor for our company. I said to him, “People want this, what do I do?” And then he said to me, “Lianna, if you incorporate a company, we can help fund your company or fund your manufacturing, you know. Get you guys off the ground.” And that was 5 years ago. And we're still using them as our main R&D partner. We're growing here. We've had amazing access to funding to students, to advice, research, everything. So yeah, it really the commercial.

I guess seeing the need of our product was almost accidental. I just wanted to do this for fun, and saw that people needed this device, and so I incorporated my company when I was 19 years old. I didn't have any business background, just the passion to help others to work hard and persevere. But obviously I couldn't have done it without the amazing support around me.

Charbonneau: Thank you. Lianna. Cliff, what about you?

van der Linden: I think maybe a common theme for both Lianna and myself, and I would argue many social entrepreneurs who we probably both know, is that many social entrepreneurs are actually accidental entrepreneurs. Unlike sort of the perspective of people who go out pursuing commercial opportunities, businesses tend to be businesses that come out of a originally out of a desire to make a social impact or to do some sort of social good, and the business tends to emerge when you see that there is a market opportunity for this social impact that you can use to sustain the impact by building a business around it and using the revenue from that business to either make a greater impact or make a sustainable impact.

And so my story is quite similar in at least in the sense that I saw a need, a need which I wish I could say is less pervasive today than it was in 2011. But I would argue that that's maybe not the case. But the need was that there was a lot of misinformation and disinformation around what different candidates and political parties stood for, and that was affecting whether people were able to cast a vote that really reflected their preferences, their priorities, and their values. And so trying to cut through that noise with applications like Vote Compass was a way to try to address what I saw as a something of an assault on our democratic institutions. I'd love to say that it's been massively successful, and we don't need it anymore. I don't think we're there, but I think it hopefully contributes something meaningful to trying to empower democratic citizenship.

Charbonneau: A question that is often asked to entrepreneurs coming out of our post-secondary institutions, is the challenges that they face, they had to face in transitioning from academic research to entrepreneurship, especially when it comes to starting a business that strives to innovate for social good, social innovation. So, Cliff, let's start with you. How did you tackle this.

van der Linden: I think that it sort of builds on both what Lianna and I were saying in our previous response, in that I don't think many of us start out with a business model from the outset, so you have to adjust to market conditions to a certain extent, to try and ensure that you have something that is sustainable in the long term. So, some of the challenges include obviously, revenue generation, because revenue generation is not typically the focal point or the original priority when you're building a social enterprise.

And so, the necessity of really understanding how you're going to ensure cash, flow, revenue, and ensuring that you continue to have product market fit are skill sets that are adjacent to the kind of training that many of us have, whether we're in engineering or social science. You have to learn quickly and sometimes you learn through failure. Honestly, by making mistakes. So I think that it takes a fair bit of tenacity to endure. But I think that one of the big differences between operating in the business environment and the academic environment is in the academic environment you can make mistakes that. Yeah, you can make mistakes and revisit and reiterate and refine, and you have more time to do that. And I would argue, you can often produce a more high quality output than academia allows for. But in in business, you often have to figure out, what's the minimum viable product? And how do I get to that in the time I have left, you know my cash flow runway will allow for?

Charbonneau: Thank you for this. Lianna.

Genovese: Yeah, I completely agree with Cliff. Everything he mentioned resonates with me, especially that sometimes you just have to learn from failures. I've had a really amazing support system around me who have always said to me, Lianna, the word fail is just an acronym for first attempt in learning, or find another important lesson. And, boy, have we learned a lot of lessons and have failed. But of course, like, I said, I started the company when I was 19, and I didn't have any business background, so I had to reach out towards others who were smarter than me. So they can lift me up, so that they can teach me about this crazy entrepreneurship world. That was reaching out to local incubators like the Innovation Factory in Hamilton. Like our business incubator at McMaster, called the Forge, the clinic at McMaster’s Health Innovation incubator. And of course, McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute. They provided me with so much engineering experience that sometimes I question if I needed to finish my degree because they just helped me so much. I had to, you know, learn about manufacturing and scaling and sourcing materials and everything when I was in my second and third year of my 5 year degree. So, by the time I graduated in 2022, we launched the product for market, and we already sold our first 250 devices within our first year, just because I was doing all the product development and preparation during my undergrad. It was definitely different to take the research and go to an entrepreneurship route. But one thing that definitely, really resonates with me is, you know, when you're creating a company that does social good is not losing that in from your mind or that vision that you have. I think oftentimes in business you do. You're pressed for your cash flow, and you know what profit you can make, and that's been super tricky with balancing the social good that you're striving towards in your innovation. But then there’s also the business side of things.

I always say to my investors and mentors, you know, sometimes I’ve got a bigger heart than the business side, which kind of is not the best in certain times, but yeah, like Cliff said, social entrepreneurs are most times accidental entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, because we definitely have that compassion and empathy that is needed to create a social impact company.

Charbonneau: So, Lianna, let's keep with you. I mean, you've touched on this in in your answer in the previous question, but how important was your commitment to social innovation to shape your entrepreneurial journey? And do you have any tricks, or how do you measure the impact of what you do?

Genovese: Yeah. So, for us maybe I'll describe a little bit more about our product. Always seeing a picture is best, so I definitely encourage people to look up Guided Hands if you have the time. But it's an assistive device that again helps people with limited hand mobility to write, paint, draw, and use technology. It's utilizing the gross motor skills in the individual’s shoulder rather than the fine motor skills in the person's hands. We help people with cerebral palsy, ALS, spinal cord injury strokes, anyone who has a medical condition or injury that impairs the hands. And honestly, the main way that we measure our impact is pictures, videos, testimonials. A child who's not able to write the first letter of his name and then, using Guided Hands, he's able to write his full name for the first time. It's seeing the reactions on parents’ faces, as their child writes or paints for the first time. I always joke and say that we make moms cry at ImaginAble Solutions. Tears of joy as they see their child do things for the first time, something that other families or parents might take for granted. These parents of children with disabilities, they are able to finally put a piece of artwork or a letter, a birthday card, on their fridge at home again. Something that many people might take for granted, so very qualitative to see the impact of our work. And honestly, that's the main way that we've been able to create awareness, just by sharing all of these beautiful pictures and videos and moments that families have with our product. But of course, we measure other things, like of the number of people that are impacted in schools, the number of people who are using it in the workplace. We definitely taking those impact metrics into consideration. But, at the end of the day it's the smile on the child or adults faces when they use our product.

Charbonneau: Thank you for this. Cliff, same questions, your commitment to social innovations. How did it shape your entrepreneurial journey and talk a bit about the impact of your work.

van der Linden: Sure. So, I think I've had the good fortune of running Vox Pop Labs as a social enterprise, but I've also founded and led venture backed companies incubated in Silicon Valley. I've been able to see the difference in the kind of decisions, the way you approach decisions based on whether you're optimizing for return to shareholders or whether you're optimizing for social good. And I'm not trying to disparage one or the other. I think you need a mix in a market economy and optimizing for return. Shareholders can also have knock on benefits for society. But I think in the social enterprise space, being able to make decisions purely on, how does this advance the public interest or social good, leads to different decisions. And, I can give you just a few examples. Vox Pop Labs has collected an incredible amount of data, public opinion data over the last 15 years that really no one else in the world has anything that quite approximates the kind of data that we collect. And we've been able to do some really interesting reflections on public sentiment and public opinion that have influenced government decision making in Canada and in other countries around the world, and really had this other sort of democratizing element where we're able to reflect public opinion back to decision makers. But one of the things, if we were in a private sector business we would be under a lot of pressure to sell that data in some way, shape or form. And because we're a social enterprise, we made a commitment early on and embedded in our articles of incorporation, our privacy policies, that we would never rent or sell the data for commercial gain. And this is foregoing a significant revenue opportunity but it's one we are comfortable with as a team, as part of our broader commitment to social good.

And in terms of measuring the impact of our work, you know, look, I'm a social scientist by profession. I'm a data scientist by training. So I rely on a lot of empirical and statistical feedback to try and get a sense as to whether we're making a real impact. And I mentioned some of those findings. We have many studies that demonstrate that we increase particularly youth voter turnout, which I think is a very important demographic to engage with. We also have studies to show that we increase political knowledge. There are a lot of benefits to the use of our tools in terms of empowering, engaging voters. But I listened to Lianna, and I also have to say that my most validating and rewarding feedback, despite my training, are the times that people will write to us, or mention to us that they used our tools, with their parents or their partners, or their children or their friends, and they talked about policy issues in an informed and enriching way, and not in a confrontational way, but in a real, constructive manner, and learned about things that they never knew about people that they love deeply and share most of their time with. They found it to be a rewarding and enriching experience. And if that's the kind of democratic discourse or dialogue that we can build more broadly, then that is the most rewarding piece of all.

Charbonneau: Very good, Cliff. Thank you for that. Let's keep with you for the next one. You've talked about your life experiences. What role do you see universities and research institutions playing in fostering this culture of social entrepreneurship?

Cliff van der Linden: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I would say that there are several roles that universities and research institutions can play. First and foremost, you know my first company was a web development company when I was a teenager, and I was able to build a company just by knowing how to code, and that was enough to build a company at that moment in time. I don't think we're in that space anymore. I think we're now in a space where building in the information economy does require training, and it requires infrastructure. We're in an age of artificial intelligence and machine learning and computer vision. The types of opportunities that we can seize in this era do require access to compute, you know, compute for modeling, and compute for cloud infrastructure. So there's a big infrastructure component that universities can bring to the table. I would not have been able to build the businesses I've been able to build, were it not for the infrastructure that was made available to me to run the kind of models that I need to run, or the kind of training I received in terms of computational social science training to become a good data scientist. And in addition, I would never have built my first business if my work wasn't incubated through the Creative Construction Lab at the Rotman School of management at the University of Toronto. The University also provided me with the opportunity to commercialize the research that I was only able to do because of the infrastructure and the training that it made available to me. And so now I'm back in the university environment, running a lab through the generous contributions of CFI. I have been able to build a high performance computing cluster that is now being used to do really avant-garde, state of the art work in areas like misinformation, detection and analyzing online hate, things like that. And my students, my graduate students, undergraduate students, are getting great training that can work in both the private industry and scholarly areas. And they can only do this because of the availability of that training and because of the infrastructure that that they can use to push the boundaries on research and innovation.

Charbonneau: Thank you, Cliff. Lianna, let's go to you. Can you say a few words about the strategies that you've used for scaling up a socially driven enterprise like yours and still staying true to the core values of inclusivity and th community benefits. I think that our audience would be interested in hearing what you have to say on the subject.

Genovese: Yes. So, one thing that has definitely kept me up at night was hearing families and getting on calls with families who are crying to me, saying, Lee and I can't afford this. So Guided Hands is $629, USD and $849 Canadian, and no matter if we discount it to 50%, 70%, there's still families who are on disability and can't afford it. I breaks my heart. And that's where it's like the heart is bigger than the business brain. So sometimes it's like, I just want to donate all of these devices. I considered being a nonprofit. But then, obviously, how would I have the money to build the product, and get it out and do the marketing and pay for my employees, so that wasn't an option. It was really difficult, and I felt bad. I was discounting left and right. I was donating left and right, and my advisors and investors were like Lianna. You need to stop.

I couldn't do it. So I had to rewire my brain and think of a different strategy. And one of those strategies was creating a Guided Hands sponsorship program, gifting a Guided Hands to families who cannot afford assistive technology. So allowing philanthropists. angel investors, our community, to gift a Guided Hands and to facilitate that on our website. We actually just launched this on November 9th. I actually received the Muhammad Ali, humanitarian award in Kentucky, where we launched this, and I actually had Shaquille O’Neale sign a Guided Hands, and we're seeing if we can get him to sponsor a few. But, just creating awareness in front of our community and allowing them to, you know, help a family. Christmas is rolling around so we're doing a giving the gift of accessibility this Christmas for Guided Hands. So again, just trying to think of different initiatives, different strategies to meet that that mission and that vision of doing social good, and also making myself be able to sleep at night, so that I can tell families that cost that there’s going to be another barrier that they're going to have to experience in their lives. So definitely, we've had to be pretty strategic and creative about meeting our mission and creating a really scalable company.

Charbonneau: So clearly, both of you have demonstrated tremendous leadership in bringing your thoughts onto the marketplace. So maybe my final question to both of you is, yes, you did it, not by yourself—collaboration is always key, is always important. So what would be your advice to the research community or researchers that would like to become a successful entrepreneurs? I mean collaboration? Who wants to go first?

van der Linden: I'll hop in and say, I do think that when you are developing a research project and you invest years of your life, all of your grant funding, all of your attention into that project you develop, you develop expert sort of credentials in that very specific area. And if you decide to commercialize there, you can have this impulse to want to own every piece of the pipeline, because in the lab, of course, while you have students and collaborators, if you're the principal investigator, you do have a stake in every piece of the pipeline. But, I think when you move into a business space, I'll say first of all, Sylvain, you're absolutely right, that you have to collaborate to get outside expertise in areas where you simply don't have the expertise. You may have a passion for the product, and know every nook and cranny of its specifications, but how to build a business around that is an entirely new ball game. So, finding people who you can collaborate with is key, and also trusting people to take on aspects of the of the business, that you may feel, you know compelled to do yourself. But if you don't learn to delegate, you'll never be able to scale. And I think scaling is a hard thing to do when moving out of academia into industry, because it's not something that research labs are necessarily set up to do. They're set up to invent and to discover and to innovate. But scaling, scaling is a whole different exercise.

Charbonneau: Lianna.

Genovese: As a researcher, scientist, engineer, I think the one thing that you definitely have to learn is to not fall in love with your product, to fall in love with the problem. So when you're commercializing, it is so important, you know, no matter who you're doing it for. For us it was the disability community. It was so important to have their voice heard throughout our entire design process and research or else you're going to innovate something that's not going to work for them. And you know, our community is telling us what the next version of Guided Hands is going to be. They're driving our innovation. We are just listening. So listening, collaborating with others, is huge and specifically for us and personally for me. One thing that I really learned that wasn't quite taught in engineering during my undergrad was compassion, really designing with compassion and involving compassion and empathy throughout your research. And the engineering design process was so important. So that meant sitting down beside a little girl, an adult who had cerebral palsy or ALS, putting their hand in yours, feeling the spasticity in their hand and understanding what they're experiencing, so that you can truly design something that will help them. So, as close as you can get to the end user or to the person that you're designing for is going help you throughout the entire commercialization pathway, because it's going to be a no brainer that people are going to want to purchase your product—that it's needed. So I would say, develop that compassion and empathy. Collaboration is also super key that was definitely mentioned. And yeah, falling in love with the problem and putting the community or the individual that you're designing for at the forefront of everything that you do.

Charbonneau: Falling in love with the problems, that's great. So, Lianna and Cliff, thank you very much to both of you for your insightful contributions, your perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of transitioning from academic research to entrepreneurship have been truly valuable. I mean, social innovation is always a complex ecosystem and you've done wonderful things. Your experiences and expertise are a great inspiration to us all, and I appreciate the time and thought that you've shared with us today. It's been a pleasure having you on the panel, and I will encourage everybody listening and watching to go onto your website and see what you guys are up to. I think it's absolutely spectacular.

Pierre Normand: Wow! Thank you so much. These are very powerful stories. Thank you so much, Sylvain, Lianna, Cliff, for such an inspiring conversation. You really highlighted the critical role of research and research facilities in driving social innovation. And that was a powerful discussion.