Success Stories

An Ottawa Region Success Story

 

B-Con Engineering

A Shining Example of Innovation in Ontario

Ottawa’s B-Con Engineering is a world leader in developing laser and optical technologies that have been used by the Canadian Space Agency and countless other clients in various industries. 

B-Con has contributed its expertise to the design and manufacture of the Phoenix Mars Polar Lander Meteorological Station.  The company’s technology can examine clouds and atmospheric dust to help give NASA scientists a better understanding of Martian weather.

The company credits a lot of its cutting-edge technology to Ontario’s colleges and universities — B-Con takes their breakthrough research discoveries and develops them so that they can be sold to other companies to put into their products.

B-Con contributed to the design and manufacture of the Phoenix Mars Polar
Lander Meteorological Station

A shining example of the power of this type of collaboration began a couple years ago when a group of professors at Algonquin College got together and came up with an idea for developing an innovative optical lens.  The lens would provide light over a large area — much more uniformly and intensely than existing technologies.

Brian Creber, President of B-Con Engineering, says there are many applications for the technology, including using it to enhance the efficiency and performance of street lamps. Or, even using the lens’ enhanced uniform lighting capabilities in light-activated cancer drugs — where regular lights are unable to penetrate the skin as deeply as needed for the drugs to work.

“The lenses will be useful in extending a camera’s depth of field. In a close up picture, only the centre of the picture is in focus while the rest is blurry.  These lenses will enable all of the picture to be in focus,” said Dr. Mark Hoddenbagh, Director, Applied Research and Innovation at Algonquin College.

It was with this theory in mind that Algonquin’s Dr. Ilya Golub and his team began designing a new type of lens that aimed to solve this problem. However, they were not able to actually produce the lens themselves. That’s when they went to the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), part of the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) for some help.

OCE connected Algonquin with B-Con Engineering, and two years later, the company and the college signed a landmark agreement that will see B-Con license the technology developed by Dr. Golub and his team.

“This partnership with Algonquin College allowed us to leverage skills within the institution to break into high technology markets we could not address in the past,” said Creber.

B-Con's technology can examine clouds and atmospheric dust on Mars to help better understand weather patterns

Creber continues to work closely with the college’s physics department and has even hired several graduates to add to B-Con’s 19 employees.

As Hoddenbagh explains, “Applied research projects are on the rise because they play a major role to increase the viability of local small businesses, create jobs in our economy and significantly shorten the time needed to bring a new idea to market by tapping into the broad range of skills at the college.  This is a different kind of research because it solves problems today, not 10 or 15 years down the road.”

Algonquin continues to work with B-Con through the OCE, and the two are currently diversifying into technological innovations in the area of biodiesel fuels.