by Pamela Scott Crace

A vase tunicate sounds like something holding flowers in a sushi restaurant. In truth it’s a tiny pest that plagues the mussel-farming industry, gumming up equipment and disrupting eco-systems.

Luckily for mussel farmers, the vase tunicate is the lifelong interest of  Summerside P.E.I., researcher Rebecca Wolfe. She’s designed a genetic test, an improvement on existing methods, to identify the creature’s DNA in water samples. Her research has the potential to solve a big problem for aquaculture.

The astounding thing? She’s is only 17.

Rebecca accepted a Young Canadian Innovator Award at the 27th annual Manning Innovation Awards in October. What slew the audience was her charming acceptance speech. In it, she said matter-of-factly that she’s been obsessed with the pesky tunicate for years­. She is going to be one hell of a marine biologist.

This issue of Progress salutes such curiosity and perseverance. Looking to the national Manning Awards, and regional programs such as InNOVAcorp’s I-3 Technology Start-Up Competition and New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru Competition, we introduce you to some promising innovators.

Starting on page 44 see how local entrepreneurs are solving problems in areas as diverse as autism education, railway overgrowth, pharmaceutical sampling, bundling machines, 3-D gaming, financial-security software, and landslide prediction. These are all ideas with huge market potential.
Consider too the useful primer about protecting intellectual property, on page 56, by patent specialist Robert Nadeau.

This issue also salutes strategic marketing that works. And the Marketer of the Year is an innovator too. Dr. Scott Farrell wrestled with a problem through most of his career. Once the solution came to him, he did what any scientist would do: he modelled a prototype out of Play-Doh. With his wife, Karen, and another business partner he founded a medical product company, EastMed Inc.­, to help treat stress urinary incontinence, a surprisingly common affliction for women over the age of 30.

The marketing challenge: it’s a taboo issue. Yet the EastMed team handled it with sensitivity and sophistication. Angelina Chapin tells their story on page 32.

Having done its test marketing in Atlantic Canada, EastMed is ready to roll its Uresta campaign out in the rest of Canada, the U.S., and Europe. It’s yet another example of local ingenuity taking on the real world.