Carleton University professor Jim Wight. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

A technology industry mentor and innovator thinks the city's next Mitel is just waiting to be plucked from an engineering student's mind.

Carleton University Prof. Jim Wight is urging local businesses to work more closely with local universities to create the next big thing.

Mr. Wight knows how powerful an idea can be. A co-founder of IceFyre Semiconductor, Mr. Wight has seen a number of school projects end up as money-making ventures. Mitel, he notes, began as an idea Michael Cowpland developed as he pursued his PhD at Carleton in the late 1960s and early 1970s. EMS Technologies' Ottawa-based SATCOM group owes much of its success to the work of one of Mr. Wight's engineering students who worked on a "high-risk" antenna project with the former CAL Corp. in the 1980s.

In Silicon Valley, Stanford University engineering students have taken ideas further. Industry giants Cisco Systems Inc. and Google Inc. both began as projects.

Mr. Wight has kept his feet in both the academic and professional worlds for decades. At a recent Ottawa Wireless Cluster event, Mr. Wight outlined how local companies can take on engineering students and parlay that time into financial success.

"There is real opportunity if managed correctly," he told the gathering. "It's not very expensive."

Mr. Wight suggested companies need to take more chances and let engineering students tackle projects that would not otherwise be attempted. These "high-risk" projects could fall apart, but even these failures are relatively inexpensive since students are paid about one-fifth the salary of experienced engineers, he said.

The potential rewards are huge, he stressed, as Mitel's longevity would suggest.

Mr. Wight recalled when former student Antoine Paquin called him one day in the late 1990s after the young entrepreneur took the helm at Philsar Semiconductor. Much of the semiconductor company's research team was made up of Carleton engineering students. However, Mr. Paquin called Mr. Wight in to work for the company for a year in order to bridge the gap between the firm's marketing and engineering staff.

"He phone me up and convinced me to take a leave from the university for a year," Mr. Wight recalled. "The technical team did not talk to the marketing team, so I was brought in to be the glue in the company."

Philsar was subsequently sold to Conexant Systems Inc. in 2001.

While some universities thumb their noses at such close relationships with industry, Mr. Wight said the Philsar situation is a good example of how the two worlds can co-exist and mutually benefit.

Mr. Wight said maintaining ties with companies and shipping his graduate students to work for them allows the students to use research laboratories they would not otherwise have access to at school. The companies, in turn, are able to test a student's abilities at a low cost before they consider hiring them.

"It's better than a two-hour interview," he said.

Besides allowing engineering students to get their hands dirty in the business world, local universities are also giving students experience in taking an idea and marketing it to investors.

The University of Ottawa's executive MBA students recently capped off months of preparations in a venture-capital pitch session. Two of the eMBA students said they came away from the experience with new skills to bring their own businesses into new markets.

Dave Myers, LaFarge Canada's general manager for Ottawa and Cornwall, worked with Quantum Biomedical to sell its merits to three venture capitalists. His group's efforts paid off as two of the three investment professionals agreed to take a closer look at the biotech startup.

Mr. Myers said he can more clearly understand how to sell an idea to investors.

"I've been in those meetings with executives before, where you get them to see the benefits of entering a new market," he said. "But, after half an hour, they run away from the meeting. You don't hear from them for months. For me, the pitch session wrapped up all the elements of the program."

EMBA candidate Ramzi Baroody, president and chief executive of Webnox Corp., agreed to let his group pitch the merits of his company for the session.

After his team made their pitch, Mr. Baroody was surprised by how much interest was shown in his business. Two investors agreed to meet with Mr. Baroody again to look at his company more closely.

"It went better than I expected it would," he said. "What I got from it is how to start with an idea, mould it and then articulate it. I learned how to make an investor say, 'Wow.'"

By Michael Hammond

Special to the Ottawa Business Journal