PERSÉIS : A Research-Society Space for Innovative Scientific Entrepreneurship

See the 2023 call for proposals

See the page on the MAIN site at PERSÉIS Mouvement des accélérateurs d’innovation du Québec

BACKGROUND

Scientific entrepreneurs hold a strong potential for innovation in Québec, given their close proximity to cutting-edge technologies, their creativity, and their analytical and experimental skills. This agility facilitates the development of the innovative solutions needed for economic and societal transformations in Québec.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem is more mobilized than ever. Major consultations have been initiated by the Government of Québec in connection with the Québec Research and Innovation Strategy (SQRI), the entrepreneurship action plan of the Ministère de l’Économie, de l’Innovation et de l’Énergie (MEIE), the creation of the Conseil de l’innovation du Québec, and the development of the scientific entrepreneurship strategy put forward by Axelys. Inspired by these initiatives, the ecosystem’s actors wish to go further by strengthening data-based decision making. However, the research initiatives that are developed are mostly one-off and short-term. The results are available but are dispersed and used in an ad-hoc manner to guide Québec’s innovation practices, often without a systematic transfer into tools for practice environments.

It is in this context that the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) and the Mouvement des accélérateurs d’innovation du Québec (MAIN) decided to pool their expertise and strengths to create PERSÉIS, a research-society space for innovative scientific entrepreneurship, in collaboration with the research community and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Mouvement des accélérateurs d’innovation du Québec (MAIN)

MAIN’s mission is to improve the cohesion and efficiency of the incubator and accelerator ecosystem and to increase its impact in the development of entrepreneurship and innovation in Québec. MAIN puts forward collective actions for resource pooling to give Québec’s science and innovation companies, wherever they are, access to the resources they need, when they need them.

MAIN organizes events, common projects and concerted actions to inspire, equip and encourage collaboration within its network.

The Fonds de recherche du Québec

The FRQ’s mission is to support excellence in research and the training of a new generation of researchers that is diverse, creative and agile in order to actively contribute to the well-being of Québec society.

The mandate of the FRQ’s Directorate of Major Societal Challenges is to strengthen intersectoral research, the links between science and society, and the co-construction of knowledge. Its programming is structured around four major challenges, including entrepreneurship and creativity.

OBJECTIVE OF PERSÉIS

PERSÉIS was created to stimulate research on innovative scientific entrepreneurship in all its diversity, based on the needs and concerns of support organizations, decision-makers and entrepreneurs. The research-society space will serve as an exchange forum for bringing together potential, existing and completed research projects, defining priority studies and experiments, and ensuring that the knowledge generated leads to common visions, tools and indicators.

More specifically, PERSÉIS aims to:

• Identify research needs in a collective approach that brings together the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the research community;
• Support the creation of unifying projects for Québec with a view to long-term exchange and interaction;
• Foster the transfer and adoption of results by the entrepreneurial ecosystem;
• Stimulate research on innovative scientific entrepreneurship across Québec.

The goal of PERSÉIS is to mobilize stakeholders at all stages of the co-construction process: from the statement of needs and research questions to the dissemination, adoption and evaluation of the impacts of research results.

The research-society space will hold several calls for projects and networking events over the next few years, the scope and criteria of which will be determined in response to emerging needs and feedback from Québec’s innovative entrepreneurship ecosystem.