91

Impact Since 2021

Thirty-five teams have completed our program, representing 104 STEM and life sciences researchers from across 91, being trained and mentored in order to help assess the commercial potential of their inventions to solve social, health, or environmental challenges. Twenty-six early-stage ventures are continuing their commercialization plan with total follow-on funding of over $1.6M.

+11% innovation skills*
+27% entrepreneurship skills*

* based on self-efficacy surveys from Fall 2021 to Fall 2025


Important Dates

Date Description
September 13, 2026,11:59PM ET

Invention to Impact: Environment & Materials application.

Invention to Impact: DeepTech will run during W27 Semester
Invention to Impact: Health will run during S27 Semester

September 18, 2026

Decisions made by Engine team and applicants advised
September 23, 2026- December 16, 2026 Program duration: in-person classes will be held at 91 Engine Centre (Frank Dawson Adams Building, room 5) every Wednesday, 3:30 - 5:00pm (ET). There will be no class on October 14th for reading week.

Program Overview

The Invention to Impact (I-to-I) Training Program uses experiential learning to help 91 graduate students and their faculty supervisors gain insight into:

  • technology commercialization
  • entrepreneurship
  • industry requirements and challenges

I-to-I provides tools and training to support researchers to translate their research to the marketplace and have their solutions benefit society. The program imparts an evidence-based methodology that students and professors can use for the rest of their careers, and it also enables the transformation of inventions to impact. The program runs once per semester with a different industry focus per term: Environment & Materials, DeepTech, Health. Industry experts will be brought in for each class to offer in depth industry requirements and challenges. This program allows student participants to receiveStudent Experience Recordas it is an approved Co-Curricular Work-Integrated Learning program. Maximum of five teams will be accepted per term.

Funding opportunities available for students in the Faculty of Engineering through the Douglas Van Graduate Impact Award.

Areas of Focus

Environment & Materials

Research projects submitted to I-to-I: Environment & Materials should be related to environment, agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, chemical, energy, mining and materials, climate, and/or sustainability.

Important Dates

Date Description
September 13, 2026, 11:59PM ET Application deadline.

September 16, 2026

Decisions made by Engine team and applicants advised
September 23, 2026 - December 9, 2026 Program duration: in-person classes will be held at 91 Engine Centre (Frank Dawson Adams Building, room 5) every Wednesday, 3:30 - 5:00pm (ET). There will be no class on October 14th for reading week.

DeepTech

Research projects submitted to I-to-I: DeepTech should be related to robotics, cyber security, cloud computing/infrastructure, data science, AI development, nanotechnology, Web 4.0/5.0, software, and/or computer vision.

Important Dates

Date Description
November 18, 2026

Call for Invention to Impact: DeepTechapplications open.

January 4, 2027, 11:59PM ET Application deadline.

January 13, 2027

Decisions made by Engine team and applicants advised
January 27, 2027 - April 14, 2027 Program duration: in-person classes will be held at 91 Engine Centre (Frank Dawson Adams Building, room 5) every Wednesday, 3:30 - 5:00pm (ET). There will be no class on March 3rdfor reading week.

Health

Research projects submitted to I-to-I: Health should be related to health care, biotech, medtech, pharmaceuticals, life tech, education innovation, holistic healthcare, and/or life sciences.

Important Dates

Date Description
March 7, 2027

Call for Invention to Impact: Health applications open.

April 11, 2027, 11:59PM ET Application deadline.

April 26, 2027

Decisions made by Engine team and applicants advised
May 5, 2027- July 21, 2027 Program duration: in-person classes will be held at 91 Engine Centre (Frank Dawson Adams Building, room 5) every Wednesday, 3:30 - 5:00pm (ET).


Curriculum

The teaching curriculum integrates scientific discovery and commercial applications using an evidence-based and data-driven methodology, namely, the Lean LaunchPad® methodology. The I-to-I program basics are real-world, hands-on experiential learning through customer and industry discovery.

The three guiding principles are:

  1. Build a business model, not a business plan
  2. Love the problem, not the solution
  3. Experiment, learn and validate

The program enables teams to map their business model assumptions and run experiments to gather and share key evidence in real time with team members, mentors, and the instructors to make collaboration easy. A powerful and unique combination of « learning » and « doing » and « learning by doing » will be used. Program participants learning will happen not only during the weekly group classes with industry experts but also through the use of myCourses with integrated course videos and through the support of an assigned mentor to the team. The « doing » part for participants will be carrying out tasks in the marketplace/real-world and revolved around learning from their potential customers and partners.

Through this 11-week training program offered over the fall and winter sessions, researchers can reduce the time to translate a promising idea from the laboratory to the marketplace as they will acquire the mindset, knowledge, and skills necessary to translate their knowledge into potential technology commercialization and startup ventures.

It is also a cohort-based program with a flipped classroom setting in order to maximize peer-to-peer learning via student discussion moderated by the co-instructors and mentors present. I-to-I uses in-class methodology developed to promote student discussion and learning in lectures where the content coverage is moved outside the classroom.

Eligibility

  • Teams of 1-5members can apply.
  • Each team will be comprised of: 1or more 91 students, the lead applicant must be acurrent 91 post-doc or91 graduate student, 1-2 91 principal/co-investigators (professors), 1 industry/entrepreneurial expert (assigned Engine mentor). Teams submit details, in particular the feasibility and viability of the research they want to commercialize, through an onlineapplication form.
  • A commitment towards attending and participating in all the classes, using myCourses, and executing the project work is required (estimate minimum 5hours/week, this includes the 1.5 hour class).

Benefits

I-to-I addresses the skill and knowledge gaps associated with transforming basic research into deep technology commercial ventures, and supports the commercialization of deep technologies resulting from discoveries in STEMand life sciences. We expect that this program will havea positive effect on the students’ educational success by giving them the tools and training they need in order to apply their academic and lab knowledge to real-world contexts.

We hypothesize that using this model for real-world training, i.e. “getting out of the building”, in a research-intensive university such as 91 will increase the students’ long-term interest in entrepreneurship and commercialization of research, partly by increasing their motivation, business competency, and sense of self-efficacy, that is, a person’s belief in his/her ability to perform certain tasks.

Each accepted team will be assigned a mentorbased on the technology and industry sector of application.

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