Propelled by donor support, Rotman is uniquely positioned to bring insights to impact.
Rotman centres, labs and institutes bring tangible advances to critical issues in business and society. This includes tackling social inequalities, commercializing medical research findings and helping build sustainable businesses.
For example, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) partnered with YWCA Canada to create a Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada, and the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) launched CDL Recovery, a program designed to rapidly transform scientific innovations into products and services that address public health and economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Rotman Catalyst Fund is instrumental in the School’s ability to translate big ideas into real-world solutions. As an internal seed funding engine, the Fund enables us to test new ideas and scale up high-impact projects. Initiatives such as GATE, Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR), TD Management Data and Analytics Lab (TD MDAL), FinHub and more were able to put their vision into action thanks to this important fund.
$5.05M: amount granted in the Rotman Catalyst Fund Spring 2020 round to support these key Rotman initiatives:
- Business Design: Designing Innovation-Ready Businesses
- Creative Destruction Lab/CDL: Recovery Program
- Financial Innovation Hub/ FinHub
- The Rotman Digital Initiative
Another example of Rotman’s leadership in tackling the world’s most pressing issues is the Sandra Rotman Centre for Health Sector Strategy. After starting the 2019-2020 year strong with a series of high-impact events, the Centre stepped up to provide crucial insights and guidance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recently, the Rotman family donated to a new financial-market-inspired PPE platform developed by Rotman professors Dmitry Krass, Philipp Afèche, Opher Baron, and Ming Hu, CovidPPEHelp breaks down the PPE supply chain bottleneck, connecting Canadian customers and suppliers through an easy-to-use marketplace.
“In North America we’re used to having our demands filled almost instantaneously. It’s a result of marketplaces working their magic. But if the market isn’t responding to demand for PPE, we have no chance of dealing with this pandemic.”
—Dmitry Krass, Sydney C. Cooper Chair in Business and Technology
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