![\"photo](\"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/apr-17-Cov.17.Eureka-Gary-Brownstone.jpg\")
<\/a>Brownstone gets involved in small, fledgling startups and manages them through the initial growth phase. \u201cOur team has expertise with taking this technology to market: finding customers and helping the founder build companies around technology,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are unique challenges in commercializing technology that make it different from other sectors, involving how to finance an idea, how to finance a company with no fixed assets (no buildings, land or equipment), which Canadian investors or bankers are really used to.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Brownstone finished his schooling, he realized he had unique experience in working with companies undergoing rapid growth, growth that could be so extreme that it had the capacity to kill the company. Anticipating the potential in companies on the verge of major growth, Brownstone\u2019s approach was to step in to provide the professional management required to shepherd them through that phase. Once a company had managed to get through that period of growth, Brownstone would exit onto the next one. Brownstone has successfully been doing this for more than 20 years now.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was recruited into this position, I saw the opportunity to do that over and over and over again \u2013 to help small companies through that first phase of growth, help get them on some solid footing for the future,\u201d said Brownstone.<\/p>\n
About five years ago, he started becoming more aware of how Israelis have successfully built a knowledge-based economy.<\/p>\n
Someone gave him the book Start-Up Nation<\/em> by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, and Brownstone, who had spent a year in Israel after high school some 30 years ago, was confused. \u201cI read the book and I thought, \u2018Are you sure it\u2019s Israel they are talking about? Now they are a tech powerhouse?\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Brownstone has, since that time, made an annual trip to Israel and is still amazed by what he sees. On those trips, Brownstone meets with people in Israel who run incubators like his, those in government, policy makers and academics, as well.<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely have a strong respect for what they have accomplished in Israel,\u201d said Brownstone. \u201cWe\u2019ve tried to bring a lot of those practices back here. I\u2019ve gone there with senior government people both from Canada and from Manitoba to sort of open up their eyes to what some of the possibilities are if you take a similar approach.\u201d<\/p>\n Since then, Brownstone has used his understanding and connection to Israel to try and bring what he calls \u201csome best practices and good policy advice\u201d back to Canada.<\/p>\n \u201cIdeas are easy and execution is difficult,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, a lot of companies, for a variety of reasons, will not succeed in actually commercializing their technology or not commercializing it to a degree that it\u2019s a viable business.\u201d<\/p>\n When someone comes to the Eureka Project with an idea, Brownstone asks three questions to determine whether or not they would make good clients. First, is the technology real? Second, is the individual (or team) capable? (Do they have enough talent? Are they coachable in terms of their own capabilities\/capacity? What are their skill sets and backgrounds?) Third, he assess whether or not there is an identifiable market.<\/p>\n \u201cIn our line of work, because of the background of the people coming in the door, that\u2019s the question that they most overlook,\u201d said Brownstone about ensuring that there is an actual market for the product or technology. Many companies \u201clook at the world as \u2018technology push\u2019 instead of \u2018market pull,\u2019\u201d he explained. \u201cWe try to turn that conversation around really early on. If you were to come in the door, we\u2019d go through the three questions and satisfy ourselves that the answers are yes, yes and yes.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of payment, Brownstone has developed a sliding scale wherein, at the beginning, clients can pay as little as a couple hundred dollars a month. \u201cWe really want to remain accessible to those that have the best likelihood of becoming [successful],\u201d he said. \u201cIn order to do that, we try to keep our fees as low as possible, so that money isn\u2019t really a barrier for them working with us. So, we offset a lot of the costs of delivering services to our clients, because we build a very strong, broad base of support. We get financial help from the province of Manitoba [and] we get some financial help from the U of M. We\u2019ve built a very broad sponsorship program, so that the corporate community supports us and our clients.\u201d<\/p>\n As the companies gain access to some financing and begin to grow, they hire on staff and gradually start paying more of the real cost as their finances allow. \u201cIt kind of puts the pressure on us to deliver what we promise we deliver when they come in the door,\u201d explained Brownstone. \u201cIf we are able to help them finance and grow their companies, they should be able to pay us a little bit more for what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n He said, \u201cIf someone from Vancouver called me and was looking for space, mentorship and local coaching, I might see if they would like an introduction to someone there who does what<\/p>\n we do, so they could have proximity.\u201d He added, \u201cBut the short answer is yes,\u201d to taking on Vancouver clients.<\/p>\n \u201cSuccess begets success, so as people find out about the things that we do … a company we helped launch five years ago will probably do something in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars in revenue this year,\u201d said Brownstone. \u201cIn Canada, that\u2019s a big deal. People from other regions hear about what we are doing and we find more and more we are getting approached from outside Manitoba. We don\u2019t want to turn anyone away, so we had to find ways to help those people.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t use Manitoba taxpayer dollars to support other companies, but we do have partners and systems in place where we can deliver those services to other province\u2019s companies.\u201d<\/p>\n He added, \u201cIn a couple of instances, we\u2019ve had companies who have relocated to Manitoba in order to work with us. There\u2019s a great ecosystem in Manitoba for these young companies in terms of government grants and tax credits, and organizations like ours that can support them.\u201d<\/p>\n The Eureka Project has developed an extensive network of companies and individuals across the United States, China, Singapore, South America, Mexico and as many as 30 other countries.<\/p>\n Rebeca Kuropatwa<\/strong> is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Eureka Project, a Winnipeg business incubator is as innovative about its own financing and growth as it teaches future entrepreneurs to be. And, with the leadership of businessman Gary Brownstone, some of its partner companies are seeing returns in the tens of millions. \u201cThe Eureka Project mandate is to help what I like to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3610,3611,3608,2226,4330],"class_list":["post-12023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-eureka-project","tag-gary-brownstone","tag-high-tech","tag-innovation","tag-israel"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}