Creative Destruction Lab

CDL was built to fix a specific Canadian gap: strong academic science, weak commercialisation. Professor Ajay Agrawal started it at the Rotman School of Management in 2012 around what CDL calls a market for judgment — the scarce input for a novice founder is not money but the judgement of people who have done it, applied to which objective matters next. Each session, founders set targets in front of a room of accomplished entrepreneurs, investors and scientists; mentors then decide, individually, whether to commit their own time to a company for the next stretch. Companies that nobody picks up leave. Colin Harris, a founding partner of the Vancouver site, described the shape of it on the TechVancouver stage in 2019: roughly 25 companies come through a year, two get cut each session, ten graduate — a very non-Canadian program, in his words, and something like Survivor. What survives the filter tends to fail on market size first, people second and technology third. The program now runs at more than 15 locations with over 20 specialised streams including AI, Climate, Quantum, Space and BioTech, and reports more than 4,000 participating ventures and CAD $51 billion of equity value created.