Labs4 launches Market to Lab pilots at RRC Polytech and NSCC

Pilots connect researcher-entrepreneurs with student teams to tackle barriers to market readiness

Labs4 has launched pilot projects for its Market to Lab (MtL) Program, now underway at RRC Polytech in the Prairies and Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) in Atlantic Canada.

Market to Lab is a two-month, hands-on commercialization sprint for researcher-entrepreneurs building research-based ventures. Participants lead a multidisciplinary student team and work with structured mentorship while tackling business and technical challenges in parallel. The aim is to remove one priority barrier holding their venture back — such as market validation, business model development or technical refinement — and finish with tangible outputs and a clearer path to adoption, investment or next-stage development.

Early interest in the program reflects the range of founders MtL is built for — graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty members and research staff, as well as technical founders emerging from labs and applied research environments. Innovations span health, digital and AI-enabled tools, clean technologies, advanced manufacturing and emerging consumer products. In many cases, what draws founders in is the chance to turn a specific bottleneck into focused progress, with a credible team and deadlines that force real decisions.

“As a country, we don’t lack ideas — we lack the capacity to turn strong research into solutions people can actually use,” said Dr. Jolen Galaugher, Labs4 board chair. “Market to Lab is a next-generation commercialization training model: it gives researcher-entrepreneurs the applied talent, mentorship and structured push to clear the barrier between validated research and something the market can adopt. It helps complete the research-to-market continuum — moving promising work from the lab into ventures, products and services that deliver real value for Canadians.”

A Canada-wide network of 38 colleges and universities, Labs4 supports researcher-entrepreneurs through programming that is nationally coordinated and locally delivered — with shared objectives and regionally tailored delivery through applied, hands-on environments.

The MtL pilots are designed to test the model in two distinct delivery environments — and to learn, quickly and honestly, what participants and student teams need to succeed.

“The college environment is an ideal environment for fit-to-purpose, just-in-time solutions for early ventures,” says Roberta Desserre, Labs4’s Manitoba hub program manager at RRC Polytech, where the pilot is based. “It brings together applied student talent, faculty oversight and rapid project cycles that can quickly turn a real bottleneck into a tested build, prototype or proof of concept, without the long timelines or high costs most founders face elsewhere.”

Manitoba pilot delivered through RRC Polytech’s ACE Project Space

At RRC Polytech, the Market to Lab pilot is being delivered through the Applied Computer Education (ACE) Project Space, an applied learning platform where multidisciplinary student teams build and test practical technology solutions for entrepreneurs and organizations.

“ACE gives founders something they rarely have at the early stage: a credible team that can turn a bottleneck into forward motion,” said Ralph Dueck, project lead for ACE Project Space at RRC Polytech. “It helps them test what’s real, build what’s needed, and come out the other side with something they can actually use.”

One example is QDoc, a digital tool developed through ACE to help clinicians and staff capture and organize key patient information more consistently at the point of care. Working in a rapid build-and-test cycle, the student team translated frontline workflow needs into a usable prototype, then iterated based on user feedback — the kind of practical, time-boxed progress that helps applied teams move from a real problem to something testable and adoptable.

ACE also operates at significant scale. This term, it includes 225 students working across 43 projects, with teams built around each project’s needs and drawing on skills in software development, data science, cybersecurity and user experience. IT Operations students often contribute business analysis and project management support to keep work organized and on track.

For the pilot, MtL is embedded in ACE’s existing project structure and delivered as a six-week intensive sprint layered onto the academic term. Each MtL participant enters with one priority commercialization barrier — the obstacle blocking the next step — and works with a student team through a focused cycle that ends with concrete deliverables.

The pilot is intentionally small, with three projects currently linked to Market to Lab: Centroid, which maps and visualizes connections between researchers to surface research ecosystems; WeLuma, which streamlines and automates university application processes; and Sole Capsule, a consumer product venture developing a modular sneaker storage and display system with integrated lighting.

Across all three, the work comes back to market proof, says Dueck.

“MtL is designed to push founders past early encouragement and into decisions that determine whether a venture can move forward: Is there demand beyond friends and colleagues? Will customers pay? What needs to change in the product or offer to make adoption realistic?”

Nova Scotia pilot tests delivery across distance and geography

At Nova Scotia Community College, the Market to Lab pilot is testing a deliberately different delivery model. Where RRC Polytech can embed MtL inside an established project space with standing teams and workflows, NSCC is using the pilot to answer a tougher question: how do you deliver the same kind of focused support at scale, across a region where geography and access shape what’s possible from the start?

“This is exactly why NSCC makes sense as a pilot site,” said Dr. Jeffrey Taylor, associate vice-president of research, innovation and workforce development at NSCC. “We’re built for reach, with 20 locations across the province — and that forces you to design a model that can work beyond one location, including virtual participation. If we can make it work here, we learn something that strengthens the national approach.”

The two pilots are also testing Market to Lab across different sector realities. In Manitoba, the program intersects with a Prairie innovation mix that often includes applied digital tools, advanced manufacturing and ag-tech-adjacent needs tied to a strong public and applied research base. In Nova Scotia, the pipeline can look different, with founder activity often shaped by ocean-related industries, life sciences and other region-specific strengths. Comparing outcomes across these contexts will help Labs4 refine what must stay consistent nationally — and what should flex locally.

So far, Taylor says, the projects proposed for the MtL pilot at NSCC are trending toward IT- and AI-driven solutions, largely digital software-as-a-service offerings. 

NSCC is also exploring how “collision spaces” can strengthen delivery — practical environments where entrepreneurship supports, applied research, and hands-on making overlap, and where teams can move quickly from an idea to something testable. If that model holds, it could become a repeatable way to deliver Market to Lab in regions where participants need both virtual access and periodic access to facilities and expertise.

For this pilot, NSCC is running Market to Lab within the college first, before expanding delivery through hub partners. That approach creates room to learn quickly, adjust the model, and confirm what participants and student teams need to succeed.

“Right now, the value is in testing what’s workable — and being honest about what has to change when you’re supporting founders across distance,” Taylor said. “This pilot lets us pressure-test the program design, not just deliver it.”

Potential to widen the pipeline

Taylor also sees Market to Lab as a practical complement to Labs4’s Technology Readiness Level-Up (TRL) programming. Where TRL helps teams advance their technology, Market to Lab gives founders a short, structured sprint to tackle the barrier that can block everything else — proving demand, clarifying the offer, tightening go-to-market fundamentals, or making product decisions that stand up in the real world.

“Market to Lab is meant to be complementary to TRL,” Taylor said. “It creates another entry point and another way to keep founders moving forward when what they need next isn’t just technical progress.”

Early recruitment at NSCC is already pointing to another value: Market to Lab may widen the pipeline beyond founders who are already active in entrepreneurship programming. In the initial group of founder-students NSCC engaged, only two came directly through TRL, while others joined through referrals and were new to formal entrepreneurship supports.

“That’s significant, because it means we’re reaching founders who have strong ideas but weren’t already in the system — and giving them a structured way to turn one real obstacle into measurable progress.”

With both pilots now underway, the focus is on results: progress founders can point to at the end of a two-month sprint, and the applied experience student teams gain by delivering against real constraints and deadlines. Labs4 will share outcomes and lessons from both pilot sites as the work progresses — including what it takes to run Market to Lab effectively in different regional contexts, what translates virtually versus what requires hands-on access, and what support model is sustainable as the program scales.

“Market to Lab is about turning early momentum into something usable,” says Roberta Desserre. “When a founder can name the one barrier holding them back — and has the right mix of student talent and structured support to tackle it — you start to see the kind of traction that makes the next step possible. These pilots are an important step toward making that kind of applied progress more accessible across Canada.”