Beedie School of Business

Beedie School of Business News

Entitled “Global Bio-Nano Firms: Exploiting the Confluence of Technologies”, the study shows that the integration of knowledge from the biotech and nanotech spheres has been driven by so-called “De Novo” firms — technology start-ups typically borne of research labs and tightly integrated with universities. The radical innovation at the heart of this emerging space — described as the birth of a new sector — opens up opportunities for new companies at the intersection of these two fields.

Beedie School of Business News

Will Mitchell didn’t come by his decision to attend business school lightly. As an 18 year old, he was pouring lead slag into a furnace for a living at a lead-zinc smelter in Trail, BC when he decided to heed the call of higher learning – from Simon Fraser University.

Mitchell, whose parents were both teachers, grew up in the scenic West Kootenay communities of Trail and Fruitvale. Geographically, he was hundreds of kilometres from the West Coast and the top of Burnaby Mountain. Psychologically, the distance was even further.

But the lure of SFU was neither dulled nor diminished by distance or geography.

At the time, Simon Fraser University was a young institution with a reputation for flexibility and radicalism. The young Mitchell couldn’t resist the mix – and in a matter of days he had made the transition from the smoke-belching smelter to classes in political science, sociology, anthropology, English and math.

“At SFU,” he says, “you could do very interesting things.”