When you invent something in a university lab, how do you find a good match for its first commercial use?
In the case of ion sensing technology developed in Thomas Szkopek’s lab at McGill, that process involved a lot of legwork by Minh Tran, BEng’16, MEng’18, a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering, and Gabriele Capilli, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University.
They spoke with “folks that we would normally not be talking to” – people who work in hospitals, on farms, with batteries, with wastewater, all kinds of different areas, says Szkopek, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “It was a long process to converge finally on hydroponics because it checked many, many boxes from a practical commercialization plan.”
Two inventions from Szkopek’s lab – the first involved research by Ibrahim Fakih, BEng’13, MEng’15, PhD’20 – have led to a proposed ion sensor to measure and automatically balance nutrients used in hydroponic farming. By doing so, the sensor would spare farmers from having to flush out the water-based system due to nutrient imbalances, thereby reducing water and nutrient waste.
“It’s one of the big issues that we face right now in indoor or hydroponic [farming] – there’s no easy way to track nutrients levels in your hydroponic system,” says Mark Lefsrud, associate professor in McGill’s Bioresource Engineering Department and one of the people consulted about the project.
“We need something that is more stable so we can do closer to real-time tracking,” adds Lefsrud, who calls the technology from Szkopek’s lab “an excellent step forward.”
Some indoor farming operations flush out water after each growing cycle. “It varies from a lot of wastewater to a significant amount of wastewater. Every company does it differently,” Lefsrud says.
Minh Tran is leading the effort to commercialize the technology from the McGill Engineering lab and co-founded Ikei. Its business pitch states that current nutrient-ion sensors are too costly, unstable and maintenance-intensive for hydroponic farmers to use, whereas its maintenance-free sensor promises a longer shelf life and would be inexpensive to manufacture.
“Every single farm that we’ve talked to has been saying ‘Yes, this is what we want. If you guys can make it cheaper and better than [existing options], we would definitely want to implement it and we’ll be happy to test it out in our farm,’” recounts Tran, one of the lead inventors of the second invention behind the sensor technology along with Capilli and Szkopek.
“There are nutrient-dispensing systems in use right now,” notes Szkopek. “We’re saying let’s integrate our sensors into the dispensing system so that it automatically balances the nutrients, avoiding the need for external lab analysis and nutrient flushing caused by nutrient imbalance in farms.”
Strategic support at McGill for entrepreneurial activities
Ikei received a big boost in December 2022 from the McGill Innovation Fund, a university-wide funding competition designed to help McGill researchers commercialize their inventions, taking the innovations from the lab to society for real-world impact. The startup was awarded $25,000 in the “Discover Stage” – a category for projects that have shown proof of concept but still require some validation. It also received the inaugural $40,000 Cleantech Award developed thanks to the vision of donor Marc Boghossian, BCom’93.
By supporting the McGill Innovation Fund, the McGill Commerce graduate is trying to bridge the gap between ‘thinkers’ in academia – who have great ideas but aren’t familiar with running a business – and ‘doers’ in the business world.
“Otherwise, you have great ideas that stay ideas, and you have people who [operate] their business the same way for ages and don’t change. But the minute you connect those two worlds together, you get a synergy effect. And it creates value added at all levels,” says Marc Boghossian, founder of Geneva-based Bomare SA, which specializes in responsibly sourced natural coloured diamonds and precious stones.
He is setting up an endowment for the Cleantech Award, which will be presented biennially to a team that is successful in one of the categories of the McGill Innovation Fund competition and whose project has a clear sustainability focus.
The goal of the award is to put valid ideas in motion. “Every effort to make things better, to have a cleaner environment through clean technology, I think needs support,” says the donor who hopes other business leaders follow suit and support the McGill Innovation Fund.
“Without investment at the right time, an idea can languish in a laboratory or intellectual property bureau like a curio on a bookshelf,” Szkopek says.
The Cleantech Award will allow Ikei to make prototypes of its solid-state ion sensor and verify how well it works in measuring and automatically balancing nutrients by testing the technology at farms that have agreed to partner with the startup.
“We know we’re going to be saving water,” Tran says. “How much are we saving? How much fertilizer are we saving? Those are important questions to be answered in terms of the environmental impact.”
The other main impact of the Fund’s support, according to Szkopek, is encouraging young people to run with their ideas and push themselves beyond their comfort zones. “It cannot be overestimated how important it is to young researchers to see that their efforts are recognized with investments that are, of course, tied to delivering on their ideas and getting them to work.”
Teams that obtain funding from the McGill Innovation Fund also benefit from a year-long support program to help them take the business side of their project to the next level. The support includes guidance from experts via a Recipient Advisory Board (RAB). (Marc Boghossian is an advisor to Ikei as part of its RAB.)
Ikei also won the Steven Pal Family Award at the 2023 McGill Dobson Cup, the University’s annual flagship startup competition.
It’s not the first time a technology startup has spun out from Szkopek’s lab. It also happened with Ora Graphene Audio, the company behind high performance loudspeaker membranes made using graphene, which is lighter than paper and tougher than steel. (Ikei’s sensor also uses graphene, albeit in another form altogether.) “We had great donor and alumni support there as well to kickstart things,” says Szkopek. “Their contributions can really facilitate taking something that looks just like a small seed and letting it grow into something that can then attract financing at a much larger scale.”