The Research Park is a concrete response to the needs of industry. The Park is an innovation enabler. It’s a place

where the necessary elements for innovation and economic development partner with business to create competitive advantage.

What makes us a different kind of research park is our mission to advance business and society by facilitating the access to the “innovation inputs” needed to accelerate economic growth for business and the social well-being of the markets in which they work.

The Park’s simple mandate is to ally with business to identify, facilitate and accelerate innovation so it can more rapidly be brought to market.

Delivering on this mandate required a new definition of a research park. The traditional definition and role of a research park could not meet the expectations and needs of industry or the goals and objectives of our Park.

Working with industry we have created a new 21st century definition of a research park that works for industry.

We have defined our Park as follows:
"A self-sustaining innovation centre focused on facilitating the creation, integration and application of innovative solutions for the region's constituents. The Park is an innovation conduit with an inflow of ideas, talent and capital from its partner networks and through the Park's facilitation hubs gives rise to an outflow of products, processes, services and ventures that create diversity, sustained markets and economic growth for the region."

This description makes the Park unique versus traditional research parks, in either the public or private sector. This uniqueness, coupled with a unique partnership of academia, government and business, a market-responsive model and a bias to action attitude, has been directly integrated into the Park's strategies and actions.

Never before have academia, government and business come together to share such a pure and focused vision. A vision defined by its commitment to seek and develop industrial innovation. A vision that recognizes innovation as key to economic growth and competitive advantage. A vision that encourages and nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit. A vision that is mindful of the communities it serves. In short the Park is, in itself, an innovation whose time has come.

Southwestern Ontario is the heartland of Canada’s chemical and plastic industries. It also home to thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land. The Bioindustrial Innovation Centre is bringing these 2 sectors together to build a new industrial powerhouse for Canada – one that converts agricultural waste into cleaner fuels and green products for a range of applications, from construction materials to automotive parts.

“Historically, all industrial products were bio-based,” notes Dr. Don Hewson, Managing Director of the UWO Research Park, who spent 28 years as a biochemist with Exxon Mobile and Imperial Oil. “Petroleum started to sweep aside some of the industrial products early in the 20 th century when organic chemists learned how to rearrange petroleum into a wide range of things. But with petroleum prices on the rise, you will see oil-based products increasingly being supplemented by bio-based products, be they energy molecules for combustion or rubber for the soles of your boots.”

Today, Dr. Hewson is one of the primary architects behind the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre – a $50 million initiative to create Canada’s leading centre for the commercialization of large-scale industrial biotechnology. Headquartered at the UWO Sarnia Research Park, BIC was awarded $14.95 million over 5 years from the Government of Canada under the new Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research program.

BIC received strong support from a coalition of companies and associations representing some of Canada’s largest economic sectors: chemicals, energy, automotive, agriculture and forestry. Other partners include the County of Lambton, the City of Sarnia, the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership, the University of Western Ontario, Lambton College and the Advanced Design and Manufacturing Institute, which includes the University of Toronto, Queen’s, Waterloo, McMaster and Western.

Sarnia-Lambton had virtually everything it needed to transform the region into an industrial and research powerhouse for biomass conversion. It has the country’s largest cluster of chemical companies, thousands of hectares of agricultural land, and access to world-renowned university researchers. It is also home to the largest automotive producing region in North America, an industry that is under significant pressure to become more sustainable and to incorporate biomass into their products.

At the core of BIC’s facilities is Dow Chemical’s former 5500 m2 lab and pilot plant building. The site is being renovated and expanded to create Canada’s first biotechnology laboratories and shared pilot plant facilities for gasification, pyrolysis, fermentation and bioremediation – key technologies for converting agricultural and forestry by products into organic fuels, chemicals, products and materials.

BIC’s support will come in several forms. It will lease lab space to academic and industry researchers working on renewable, sustainable bio-based products. Spring 2008 researchers can apply for BIC’s $5 million Chemistry Innovation Fund, which will award funding on a competitive basis to projects with promising commercial potential. Applications will be renewed by a Hybrid Chemistry Council comprised of experts from industry and academia.

During its first five years, BIC expect to support over 100 projects, launch one or two start up companies or new product lines each year, create up to 1000 jobs in research and engineering, and ultimately attract over $1 billion in new bio based investments to Canada by 2014. (Courtesy of www.nce.gc.ca)