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‘Entrepreneurship can change the world.’
This can often feel like a throwaway line to make something seem more important than it really is. But Jocelyn Mackie, HBA ’03, is a believer.
In fact, she lives it every day as the Co-CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, an innovation platform that has supported over 1300 innovations in 90 countries. Joining the Entrepreneur Podcast, Mackie shares many of their great success stories and breaks down the nonprofit’s selection process, and funding model for innovative ideas.
Join Eric Janssen on this important episode and discover Mackie’s personal journey, and how Grand Challenges Canada is changing the world, one innovative idea at a time.
The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
Eric Morse
You're listening to the entrepreneur podcast from the Western Morrison Institute for Entrepreneurship powered by Ivey. In this series Ivey entrepreneur and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session.
Eric Janssen
Innovation isn't just about technology, it's about bringing together users understanding problems and analyzing collisions. For this topic, I wanted to bring in a guest who not only understands innovation, but funds it as one of the largest impact first investors in Canada. Today's guest is Jocelyn Mackie, the CO CEO of Grand Challenges Canada. Funded by the government of Canada and other partners Grand Challenges funds innovators in low and middle-income countries using their unique approach called integrated innovation. Grand Challenges Canada has supported a pipeline of over 1300 innovations in 106 countries, and their investments have saved and improved lives for 10s of 1000s of people. Jocelyn, his role as the CO-CEO is to give leadership and insight to all aspects of the organization's innovation platform. Prior to becoming the CO-CEO Jocelyn was a lawyer at Gilbert's LLP. And in this episode, we talked to her about her journey from practising intellectual property law to running an innovation platform enjoy this visit with Jocelyn Mackie. Maybe Jocelyn, if you don't mind a quick intro and background on Grand Challenges. And if your personal story, I think it'd be interesting for students as well.
Jocelyn Mackie
Okay, great. Well, Grand Challenges Canada, so we are an innovation platforms. So we have supported over 1300 innovations in over 90 countries around the world. And we are designed to support innovations that are scientific and technological innovations, business innovations and social innovations that are driving sustainable impact at scale. So what do I mean by that? So impact is about for us, mostly saving and improving lives. And at scale. We want to do this for a lot of people. We're designed to leverage resources, so dollars from the public sector, the private sector, we're predominantly funded by the government of Canada, but also other governments around the world, the US government, the UK, the Dutch, Australian government and some big philanthropies. Also, we have an annual budget of around 50 million a year, we deploy grant and on Grant financing, so some patient capital, some some early stage loans and equity investments. We've invested in a global health investment fund Impact Fund. And we're trying to launch a second fund focused on women and children's health. And so we're a funder and enabler of innovation for impact. That's sort of GCC in a nutshell. But I, I'd love to talk a little bit more about some of the areas that that we focus on. So one of our big areas that we're most known for is global health. So we have innovations to around, you know, saving and improving women and children's lives around the time birth and mental health, we have a big portfolio, we're one of the largest funders of mental health innovations in the world. Early Childhood Development, sanitation, sexual reproductive health and rights. Those are kind of some of the areas of the innovations that we work in, in global health. And I'm going to give you an example. So this is Bempu. And the challenge that they're addressing is that newborns are often unable to regulate their body temperature. And that can relate results in hypothermia. So that's a condition that affects about 85% of newborns globally. And so this innovation is a device that will alert mom and dad if their newborn is hypothermic, which allows for easy medical intervention. So that's one example in our our health portfolio. This one's really cool. So this is from Hala systems. And the challenge that they're addressing is that airstrikes have been one of the largest single cause of civilian deaths in Syria since 2013. Over 80,000 Civilians are estimated to been killed and many more kind of injured. And so their innovation is called century. And it's like a an Internet of Things air raid siren system. So through artificial intelligence, they can identify and predict threats for people living in conflict zones, and then they send them an early warning through like Facebook, Twitter, radio, and even like physical sirens, about seven to 10 minutes ahead of an airstrike so that people can get out of the way. So that's a really cool one in our humanitarian portfolio. And then last but not least, our our newest area have impact is in indigenous innovation. So this is a portfolio also funded by the government of Canada focused on supporting women and Two Spirit indigenous entrepreneurs to test their ideas. This is cheekbone beauty, and it's a cosmetic company using plant waste to produce sustainable packaging and products, incorporating indigenous worldviews and processes. And all of their products are recyclable. Repurpose-ouble biodegradable. And I believe they may have just gotten picked up by Sephora. So I think they might be in Sephora now. So that's one of the innovations that we've supported.
Eric Janssen
So Jocelyn, can you just so we break it down into very simple terms? So someone? How does your innovation process work? So you are an organization that's set up to help, I guess, source, screen, fund and then grow? Innovations or businesses? How does this work? Someone has an idea, they go to your website, like, logistically, how does this happen?
Jocelyn Mackie
Yeah. So where we start is that we define grand challenges. So what a grand challenges are significant barriers that if overcome, they will lead to impact. So once we've defined what a grand challenges and we do that definitional process with experts, so you know, people who have lots of degrees at the end of their names, but also people with lived experience, other innovators, entrepreneurs, policymakers, buyers at the end of the day, so we define what the problem is, but we never define what the solution is. And by doing it that way, it then allows the solutions to be to come from anywhere, be anything, we have innovators who came up with a new way to birth babies, and he was a car mechanic. So that's an example. Um, so then what we do is we launch calls for proposals. So a request for proposal goes up on our website, we promote it, and people apply, generally, they first apply for a seed grant. So an early stage grant to test their bold idea. 100 to $200,000 is sort of the general amount. And really there we're looking for, you know, is it doesn't got doesn't have traction, you know, will it work to a certain extent, at least in a in a limited setting. And we expect a lot of failure there. So we have a high risk tolerance for failure at that early seed seed stage. So you know, our, our call our stars call for proposals that just closed, we got maybe 1000 applications, and we'll find about 60 of them. And of those 60, about 15%, we tend to pick up at our next stage, which is called Transition to scale. And that's where we get, we start to look more like venture capital, but softer, but still venture capital with an impact focus, those 15% who have the most traction that we think are most likely to succeed, then we work with them, our investment managers or our program officers work with the innovators to develop their next stage of their proposal. And then those get pitch to our Investment Committee. And we find that different phases and tranches, depending on how far along the innovation is what kind of support that it needs. And the Investment Committee is really looking at, you know, four kind of big questions, is it bold? Like innovative? Can it scale sustainably? What is the role that GCC... Like.. Do we bring value add to it, because if someone else is going to fund this, then then we kind of back off and we won't get involved. Bold, innovative scale and sustainability. And what's our kind of we want to be catalytic, we want to make sure that our dollars are catalytic. And so then you can move along the stage from transition to scale one, which generally is about half a million dollars to transition to scale 234 kind of up with bigger dollar amounts. And at that stage we'll find with grants but that's where also the risk capital comes in. So helping entrepreneurs, you know, get their first shareholders agreement crowd in other funders, because we require other funders to be at the table, or other investors or partners with skin in the game at that stage with the hope that by the time you finish phase four, you're picked up by someone else, whether that's the public sector, or you're, you know, generating some revenue, but you don't need our kind of government grant capital.
Eric Janssen
Got it! Your approach to innovation, the integrated innovation. Can you break that down for us? I think that's part of what or maybe what makes your organization so unique. So what is integrated innovation for you?
Jocelyn Mackie
Yeah, this is a concept that we kind of CO developed early days with our founding chairman, Billy Joseph Robin. And the real concept here is that it's the coordinated application of different types of innovation. So everyone knows about kind of technological innovation or scientific innovation, right. So the new the new iPhone, or the new technology, but but we felt and what we've observed is that the innovations that also really take into account social innovation, so you know, what is the local context? And what are the the, the social structures that play with your end consumers, or buyers at the end of the day, and looking at the, you know, ethical, social, public policy, you know, all that kind of stuff. And there's lots of interesting social innovations that we have, which are around behavior change often. So when you when you think about social innovation, combined with the technological innovation, so the human component of taking up a new product or service, with the third aspect, which is business innovation, so what's the appropriate delivery mechanism? Um, you know, what kind of sustainability model do you have? Are you just selling to consumers? Are you totally taking a private model? Or do you, you know, should you be selling to governments? Or should you sell a certain price in certain markets and subsidize that for other markets so that you can have broader reach. We have other business innovations that we've dabbled with, including development impact bonds, you may have heard of social impact bonds. So we have one in Cameroon... that's, which is like an innovative financing mechanism, which is also a form of a business innovation to figure out how to pay for some of these innovations that are more in the public sector.
Eric Janssen
When we look at your innovation process, so like sourcing, screening, funding growing, what are you seeing, like what, since you get so you see so many of these, right? You see literally 1000s of people saying, Hey, I think I have something cool. On the sourcing or screening side, what are you seeing as the most, I don't know, other takeaways or things that we can learn as the people who want to come up with some of these innovative ideas? What are some of the patterns you see from ideas that are maybe I don't know better is the right word, but the ones that are more interesting for you versus others?
Jocelyn Mackie
Certainly, the basics for us are the, you know, the evidence, like does it work? Right, there's been lots of stories out there, you know, Theranos and others about things not actually working the way up, right. So we're a very science kind of evidence heavy shop. And so that is really important to us. And we recognize that it's not cheap to achieve that, right. So we'll often in our seed stages support that evidence generation. So one example there is the Friendship Bench. And that's a social innovation. So a cognitive behavioral therapy delivered by grandmothers on benches in Zimbabwe. And the problem there is that, you know, 25% of the population have common mental illness. And there was only about, check my facts here 10 psychiatrist in the entire country of 13 million people. So clearly, you can't service this through service, mental health through psychiatrist, a social innovation or a delivery innovation on how to deliver cognitive behavioral therapy in a in a different way that was actually going to be possible to scale. But the innovator had to be able to show that it works. Right. You know, you're... the government's who are thinking of implementing this and some of the private sector players who are now partnered with it wanted to know that you actually can get outcomes through grandmothers delivering the therapy and not psychiatrists. So we funded a clinical trial that showed through two cohorts that it actually reduces suicidal ideation by five times reduces depression by three times. So that's really critical for us got to work. And there's got to be some evidence behind it.
Eric Janssen
So ideas, you're looking the initial funding, they have some sort of maybe you help them get more evidence, but you're looking for some evidence that what they have is actually already working. It's already got traction, it's not just an idea. It's like partl... partly executed already. Is that right?
Jocelyn Mackie
Some for the seed stage, when you're coming in, you don't necessarily need evidence, it's more about your idea. A little bit of evidence is helpful. Um, but it's okay if you don't have the evidence yet. And so our grant can help you get that initial evidence.
Eric Janssen
Got it! Got it.
Jocelyn Mackie
But that is key for the ones that we won't take them forward if there isn't evidence at like at the next stage, second thing is definitely, you know, the classic, I saw your hustle and grit, the grit; the perseverance of the entrepreneur. And often it changes, right so often will have the kind of phenotype of the chief tech Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief scientists, or even an innovator that's in a university, and then they spin out into a startup. But then they have to bring on a CEO who's different, right, then the then the innovator. So we don't all have all the traits that one needs to usually make a business successful. And so really figuring out for you, what is your stick, I mean, you guys are all in business school. So I suspect it's, it's more the, the the business and the sustainability and the partnership stuff. But we often see that not one person can do all of those things. But we certainly are looking for a leadership team, or leaders who've got that perseverance, because there are always bumps in the road, there are always challenges. And it's, it's you either got it or you don't, and you can stomach startup churning. So that kind of grit is another one. And then I guess the third one for us for sure, our partners can't do the stuff along. And what we're really looking for are partners with skin in the game, we get lots of applications and said, Oh, I have this nice letter. And this business is going to help me... we're looking for when they actually put dollars on the table or resources on the table, that real skin in the game that they believe in this. And the more partners around the table, the more likelihood of success to succeed. We recognize that when the innovations come to us, they may not have any, and that's okay. But as they continue on the journey, that's what we're looking for. And what we need to see to see that there's someone else out there who believes in this innovation believes in this business believes in the social enterprise. And it's not just government dollars, that are backing it up. So that becomes more and more critical as they go on their journey towards scale and sustainability.
Eric Janssen
You are in some ways, a lot like venture capitalists, right? People apply to you with their ideas, you have some criteria to evaluate them. Maybe your metrics are a little bit different than a traditional venture capitalist, then you fund them. Let's spend a few few minutes on funding. It's not a topic that we spend a lot of time on at Ivey, typically a venture capitalist is one want to take an equity stake, you're going to dilute your own ownership in the company wanted to see if there's how do you typically fund these innovations?
Jocelyn Mackie
So we always start with grants, because it's just the stuff that comes to us is usually very early stage. Even...
Eric Janssen
Free money is grants free money, is that what you're okay, free money. So we start with free money. All right, got it.
Jocelyn Mackie
Yeah, free money. So grants, is what we start with, because we recognize that these these ideas are really hard to get off the ground. Now, it's free, but it comes with, you know, it's comes in milestones, and you have to achieve outcomes, you know, it's not just we write you a check and say good luck, right. So it's, um, it's done in a tranched way so that we can mitigate our risks also, but yes, free money, and, and then at the transition to scale phase. So once you have some evidence, and you have some other partners, if you're a business, then that's when we start looking at not free money. So very patient capital, usually loans is where we start with really long time horizons. And we've learned over the years to structure them more like, like with really small repayments, kind of monthly repayments at a certain time, rather than a big bullet payment, we just find the businesses we support can't handle it. So it's not like your mortgage, right, you pay, you know, as a business, you're paying $3,000 a month to gradually, you know, pay it back in kind of seven to 10 years. So very long time horizons, we don't usually take security sometimes if there's strong IP portfolio, we'll take some security on the IP, but we won't take security on hard assets. And we take if we take security on the IP, it's only in pursuit of what we call global access, because we're an impact first funder. So we want to make sure that the public dollars that we put in are going to have impact at the end of the day for underserved populations. So I could talk a lot more about that. But we also sometimes take better license rights in low and middle income countries to ensure that the innovations will be made accessible. So that's a kind of an aside. And then we'll do some equity investments also... really cautious about how much we're you know, asking the entrepreneur to dilute as you said their stake and making sure there's enough room for them to crowd in future rounds because we're so early, but we're of the belief that if this enterprise is going to be commercially successful tasks pears, which is who we're funded by should have those dollars returned so that we can continue to do good work. We're not for profit. So that's sort of the balance, right? We're willing to take risks, and willing to get as much impact as possible with that risk. But if there's going to be a commercial success, we want at least our dollars back so that we can do more and more of these.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, got it. Got it. So we talked in class earlier about innovation being combination of having an idea, making it valuable for some stakeholders, whether its customers, or the business or broader society, multiplied by execution, and actually getting it out there into the world. So what have you learned about actually getting ideas? Once they're funded and out and out there? There's got to be some best practices that these future entrepreneurs can learn about? Like, how do you make sure that they actually are executed properly and are able to have the impact that they promised?
Jocelyn Mackie
Yeah, great question. I mean, I'm a big believer that anything successful is about 10% strategy and 90% execution. We often wish it was the other way, those of us...
Eric Janssen
Got everybody's scribbling in here, Jocelyn. That was good.
Jocelyn Mackie
Yeah, ideas are awesome. And and we need them. But in my opinion, organizations and businesses fail on execution, not on the lack of good ideas. So I mean, you really need to make sure that on your team, if it's not you, there's somebody who's really strong and execution. Yes, my title was VP operations, that's not actually one of my strengths. But I figured out how to bring good people around me, and how I enabled them to really plan, you know, okay, what's the three year plan? How are we going to work backwards, you know, project management is really the the skill that you need. And then that allows you to have some foresight, on some of the risks that are going to come up. You still need to be able to nimbly adapt, because you can't plan for everything, right. And that is what I am good at. And I can deal with in the moment and change course. So you need a bit of both, you need the planning, and the kind of operational heft. But then you also need as an entrepreneur to be able to be nimble, change course, you know, double down on things that are working. So I think it's that that mix, and it's very rare in my in my observation that somebody has both. So surrounding yourself by people who are not like you is really important and figuring out how to get the best of that. So that's one of the the real things. Another thing on the execution is really, really understanding what your buyers need. A really good example, another innovation I can talk about is Hewa Tele. So this is, you know, really relevant in our COVID time. And this is a an oxygen, they provide oxygen in Kenya. And it's not really a technological innovation, because they're kind of oxygen cylinders. There's nothing really that innovative about the technology itself. But it's really a business innovation, and how they partner with the local counties who run the hospitals, so that the oxygen can be provided as needed. And it's these partnerships with the local counties. And this business. That is, is the key here. If Hey, what's how they didn't really understand what the counties needed, what they could deliver what they couldn't deliver, this, innovation never would have gotten off the ground. So really understanding what your customers your buyers, partners need, and then figuring out how to deliver on that is a is a critical point. Because if you don't have buyers or customers, you know, you don't really have anything so that it goes to market research and and real engagement with your end your end users or buyers.
Eric Janssen
This is off script Jocelyn, and totally not related to innovation, but in our pre calls. And during this conversation, you strike me as someone who loves her job, and is all in on her work. And obviously there's a lot of accoutrements that come along with that. How did you find this role?
Jocelyn Mackie
I always sound so horrible, but this was my like, 18 year old brain, I was not sure if I wanted to run the world or take over the world. Like that was my thing when I was 18 right. And so I started at Huron College down the street from you folks. And I was in International Development and I I went and dug latrines and Honduras and I, we started a social enterprise and I'm like, okay, I'm going to like work to help save the world. That's my calling. But then I started getting really frustrated and seeing how limited and difficult that was. And I was frustrated without, with the lack of practicality, that people were approaching the problems. And so then I accepted my pre-acceptance to Ivey. And I went to business school and I loved it. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to go into business, and I'm going to change the world, from within from within big business. And I worked for a pharmaceutical company. And then I got disillusioned and, and then floundered for a bit, I did a master's in bioethics and looking at ethical decision making in the bioscience industry. So pharma and tech, and I looked around the people that were leaders, and they were either physicians are or had a PhD in philosophy, or lawyers. I have no lawyers in my family. But I felt like that was the fastest way that I could get out there and start making a change. So I went to law school, and I really worked in health policy, and worked for an intellectual property firm and got to do some really cool work, I worked on the Hill in Washington changing, working to change legislation, on behalf of pharmaceutical companies trying to get access to drugs, trying to get cheaper drugs out there. So you know, mostly representing Generic Pharmaceutical companies trying to fight the big bad brands. I say that with jest because they're all doing important work in different ways. And I stayed in private practice in law for much longer than I expected. And Grand Challenges Canada, Peter, Singer was our founding CEO, and he, he was my thesis supervisor, and I, I was ready to make a leap, I was pregnant with my twins at the time. And I made a pitch to them, they were about five people. And I said, Bring me on as your general counsel, you'll save a lot of money. But I want to be part of the strategy. And so I helped build the Investment Committee, build our processes, and our partnerships, and worked my way up to VP operations. And yes, I do love my job. And then when I stepped down my UI, who kind of does the science and the programmatic stuff, we co applied to be co CEOs. And I do love my job. And I think the reason I love it so much is because I get to bring business principles and my knowledge from kind of being an intellectual property lawyer. And that kind of this is how the world works. There's just a practical aspect of getting stuck to my conversations with government, with entrepreneurs, with partners, towards making an impact to saving and improving people's lives. And so it's that mix that really Jazz's me up. And I found that where I spend most of my time is what I call translating, you know, enabling indigenous leaders at GCC to change our processes to decolonize them, to make them less Western and more grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being and so I'm, I'm translating that to our board, for example, when talking to government, I'm translating what the innovators on the... on the ground need, so that they don't impose terms on us that we have to impose on innovators that are going to, you know, destroy innovation before it gets off the ground. So I spent a lot of time speaking, quote different languages, not not actual languages, but different types of speak, to bring different partners together.
Eric Janssen
That's great. No, I, I, it's helpful to get the context in the backstory. So it feels like there's no way you could have predicted that you would be the CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, winding road, not unlike I don't know, anybody we've ever had in the class before. So that's great. One question, I like to ask all our guests, any advice to your 20 year old self, you were here? Just a few years ago? Yeah. The old Ivey building, I'm assuming I was too. But any advice to your 20 year old self?
Jocelyn Mackie
Yeah, I mean, I think I wish I could have just trusted the process a little bit more. I was so anxious about making a wrong decision, or knowing what my path was going to be. I remember being in tears during my Masters going... What am I doing? You know, I just... and knowing that, the bad decisions so to speak, you'll learn something from and it will take you in a place that you won't know So, guess what I'm saying is that there are no bad decisions because you'll learn from it. You'll be like, Okay, I definitely I was a farmer Simple sales rep and I hated it was horrible. Um, but I really learned what I didn't want to do. And it you know, I pivoted, and then I kept going. So no decision is a bad decision. This kind of a path is super normal now it wasn't 30 or 40 years ago, like you're supposed to pick and you sort of stay. It's really accepted now that you dabble and you try and you figure this out and, and when you're going for your job interview or you're pitching your vision to your investors. That path is what makes you interesting. It's what gives you wisdom. So embrace that and try I mean with all of our you know, all the anxiety in the world mental health, you know, try and enjoy the ride and and know that you'll you'll you'll figure it out, and that the bad decisions are important too. That's what I wish I knew.
Eric Janssen
That's great. Well, Jocelyn for so with such a busy calendar and such a big mandate, we certainly appreciate you taking an hour plus of your time with the preparation, everything else. So thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Eric Morse
The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Quantumshift 2008 alum Connie Clerici and Closing the Gap Healthcare group. To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player or visit entrepreneurship.uwo.ca/podcast Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,