Innovation in Canada Pt. 2: Tyler Hamilton is helping cleantech startups thrive
The Senior Director of Climate at MaRS discusses the importance of clean tech commercialization, and how Canada can position itself as a global leader in green technologies
Welcome back to Building Better, a newsletter about Canadian business leaders building a better world.
Last week, we kicked off a new weekly series about how Canada can improve its innovation ecosystem. For our second installment, I’m excited to introduce you to someone working on the front lines of this challenge, helping connect Canadian entrepreneurs to capital, customers, and community.
Tyler Hamilton is Senior Director of Climate at MaRS Discovery District, where he guides all climate-related activities for ventures, corporate partners, and investors, including the flagship Mission from MaRS program. Prior to joining MaRS, Tyler spent two decades as a journalist and wrote extensively about Canada’s clean technology sector and global cleantech trends for publications like the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Corporate Knights.
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Meet Tyler Hamilton
As the Senior Director of Climate at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District, Tyler Hamilton spends his days connecting more than 250 cleantech startups with investors and mentors, working to address the systemic challenges standing between Canadian inventors and the markets their inventions can serve.
Hamilton’s path into the Canadian startup ecosystem was anything but linear.
After receiving his Master’s in journalism from Carleton University, Hamilton began his career as a reporter for the Globe and Mail, and later the Toronto Star. He honed his skills covering technology through the prolific rise and subsequent collapse of the dot-com and telecom bubbles. But as the hype around the internet economy faded, Hamilton’s interests began to shift elsewhere.
“I wanted to divert my attention to something that was new but also had more social impact,” he said.
In the early 2000s, two things changed for Hamilton. In 2000, he left the Globe and Mail to join the Toronto Star as a columnist covering technology. Then in 2005, he met Nick Parker, a fellow resident of Toronto who inspired him to focus more on climate change.
Parker founded and was at the time Chairman of Cleantech Group, one of the first organizations worldwide to treat environmental and climate issues as a serious business concern and opportunity. He was also the first to coin the term ‘cleantech’ back in 2002 to refer to a new suite of technologies that could help deal with climate change.
Before Parker repurposed the term, “if you searched ‘cleantech’ on the internet, it was usually associated with dry cleaners,” Hamilton recalled.
Hamilton’s conversations with Parker opened his eyes to a new wave of companies tackling the environmental crisis. He began writing a column for The Star’s business section, providing a “hopeful” and innovation-centric perspective on the climate and environment not usually found in typical coverage of environmental disasters.
“It was meant to counterbalance all the doom and dread and to say, ‘OK, yeah, we got a problem, but there is entrepreneurial spirit in Canada trying to tackle some of these issues,” said Hamilton.
The positive feedback from readers was overwhelming, with people reaching out to ask Hamilton how they could apply their skills to solve environmental problems, too.
In 2011, Hamilton carried his interest in business and the environment to a new post as Editor in Chief at Corporate Knights, the Canadian magazine covering sustainability and the economy. The role gave him a new perspective on how corporate leaders thought about environmental issues. When an opportunity arose to make the switch from writing about sustainability to making it a reality, Hamilton took it.
Climate change: A mission from Mars
The opportunity in question was at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub connecting startups with networks, funding, and other resources to help them succeed.
“I still wanted to work with the entrepreneurs that I wrote about, but at MaRS, I could do it in a different way.”
Today, Hamilton is the Senior Director of MaRS’ climate program, leading initiatives to help Canada’s most promising cleantech founders succeed. One of the biggest barriers to that success, says Hamilton, is the relative lack of funding for high-tech founders when they try to take their innovations from university labs and into the market. As we discussed last week in our introduction to this series, Canada punches above its weight in academic research, but public and private investment falters at the commercialization stage of innovation.
One of the key ways Hamilton is solving this problem is through the “Mission from MaRS” initiatives, which seek to dismantle systemic barriers to commercialization for key industries. One of Hamilton’s current areas of focus is aligning government and industry procurement strategy with research investment.
“[Canada] pumps billions and billions of dollars into supporting R&D,” explains Hamilton. “But when it comes to commercializing a product, [governments] kind of go, oh, we're not buying that.”
Cleantech companies in particular are trying to solve system-level problems that require large upfront investments in infrastructure. You can’t prove the commercial viability of a direct-air capture carbon removal technology in someone’s garage or backyard. You need scale. In many cases, we have the technology we need to solve our most pressing problems, but somebody needs to take the risk in purchasing or investing in the first solution so that it has a chance to prove itself.
New Frontiers
For Hamilton, the work is just beginning.
He’s currently working on a new Mission from MaRS focused on food and agricultural technologies in Canada. Food production accounts for roughly 10% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and that figure doesn’t even include the fossil fuels used to power equipment and transport goods. At the same time, the industry is under increasing pressure from global supply chain disruptions, climate-related crop failures, and a growing population demanding more from less.
From precision agriculture startups that use AI to optimize water and fertilizer use, to vertical farming systems that decouple food production from land constraints, Canadian innovators are already developing tools that could redefine what sustainable agriculture looks like. But without the right capital, partnerships, and policy support, these innovations risk stalling out before they scale. By supporting these companies in their growth stage, Hamilton’s work holds the potential to dramatically improve Canada’s domestic business landscape and transform us into a global source of expertise.
If done right, MaRS’ work won’t just help modernize industries in Canada, it could better position the country as a global exporter of climate-tech solutions. That’s where Hamilton sees the real promise of his work. It’s not just about supporting a few big winners, but coordinating a larger ecosystem shift that leaves everyone better off.
Thank you for reading Building Better!
This monthly newsletter is written by me, Sara Chiarotto O’Brien. By day, I’m a management consultant living in Toronto. By night, I write this thing you’re reading. You can learn more about why I started this newsletter here.
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Great profile! Keep ‘em coming. :)