Tech-business guru good fit for incubator BCC

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This article was published 29/02/2012 (4988 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FOR a business incubator such as BCC (Biomedical Commercialization Canada), a guy like Ed Richmond is a godsend.

Richmond, 55, is a senior management executive who most recently was chief operating officer at Imris Inc. Prior to that, he held increasingly senior positions at StandardAero.

Richmond retired from Imris after a five-year stint last fall and has become executive-in-residence at BCC.

Richmond will help develop some of BCC’s technologies — some of them orphaned — from a point where there might not even be a semblance of a business plan into a commercialization model that could be developed into a real, sustainable business.

And what’s even better for BCC’s clients is Richmond does not need to be paid — he’ll work for equity.

“I have always taken great pride in helping develop people and see them succeed in their career objectives,” he said. “It is an opportunity to meet some very interesting people with a wide range of interesting ideas and solutions and hopefully impart my experience to help them achieve success.”

Richmond may return to the corporate world at some point, but he said he can see being engaged in this sort of pursuit for the rest of his career.

“This is very exciting,” he said. “I had reached a point in my career where I wanted to seek other opportunities and try something new.”

Among other things, Richmond said he wants to work with technologies that have global market potential.

So far, he has selected six local projects, all at different stages of development.

They include a technology to measure pH levels in fetuses, another to improve the accuracy of MRI breast imaging and biopsy and a non-invasive personalized feedback system that enables a person to measure their arterial stiffness within 30 seconds.

“My intent is to be as objective as possible,” Richmond said. “I will assess the potential, understand the market and determine how it could make money.”

Once that is established, he said it will depend on the inventor as to whether they want to run a business or just extract value and move on.

Richmond knows every one of the technologies he’ll work on could take different pathways toward success.

For Marshall Ring, chief executive officer of BCC, Richmond’s presence opens up an arena of possibilities.

“Ed gives us the capacity to pick up on innovations that occur here locally, but we would not otherwise have the management capacity to drive through to commercialization,” Ring said. “There is tons of innovation here but very few companies formed around those innovations.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca