Earlier this month, Professor Matt Ratto, who coordinated UofT’s emergency efforts to produce PPE for health professionals treating COVID-19 patients, testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology where he emphasized that community-based science and technology innovation should be supported in the same ways Canada and universities support innovation focused on private enterprise.
“When COVID hit, I turned my attention to seeing what we might do about it,” testified Ratto, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Information, who holds the Bell University Labs Chair in Human-Computer Interaction. “I got a little bit of money from the University of Toronto to set up what we ended up calling the Toronto Emergency Device Accelerator and brought together a group of faculty, students and staff to work on critical issues.
“Since then, we’ve produced about 10,000 face shields and distributed them to hospitals and long-term care facilities, supported the development of a number of hospital-centred projects and provided essential equipment to assist in the development of a Canadian N95 mask test facility run out of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
“But really what we did is we supported what has been called community-based innovations focused on supporting communities in need. For example, the face shield project that we built was really part of an open innovation process through which we built on the solutions of others and provided our own solution to others as well using open licensing to support widespread dissemination and quick improvements rather than using patents or other IP mechanisms.”
Read the transcript of Ratto’s full testimony or watch the video starting at 14:11:20.
