REAP stands for Research Entrepreneurs Accelerating Prosperity. REAP brings academic and private sector partners together to explore new technologies - specifically, technologies involving interactivity, responsiveness, and digital display environments -to spark "research entrepreneurship."  Research entrepreneurship departs from the traditional "lab to patent" model in which researchers create technologies from scratch.  Instead, it focuses more on finding new applications of, and business opportunities for, emerging technologies.  Our researcher-entrepreneurs are University of Waterloo undergraduate students, and our labs are meant to "cultivate talent ... to harvest prosperity."

To turn talent into prosperity, REAP is co-founder of a new lab with Quarry Integrated Communications, St. Jacobs, where students, faculty, and industry experts work on funded projects. These projects will open up new markets - and with them, new sales opportunities - for visual display and signage technologies. Funds generated by REAP's successful entrepreneurship funnel back to the program, providing the next group of students with the intensive, hands-on experience of taking an idea from conception to adoption.

What makes REAP different from other technology-entrepreneurship initiatives?

Three things make REAP unique. First, REAP uses an "effectuation" rather than the lab-to-patent model of innovation. Where the lab-to-patent model is expensive, time-consuming, fraught with intellectual property issues, and dependent on external funding to ensure commercialization, REAP's model is agile, inexpensive, limits IP issues, and is quick to market.

Second, rather than hosting student projects across a wide range of hardware and software products and services,  REAP  focuses its resources to participate fully in one business segment - Interactive Display Environments and Applications (IDEA).  In this way, every REAP student creates solutions that other students can build upon immediately, rapidly increasing REAP's technological capabilities while quickly widening the potential markets for each project.

Third, REAP's focus allows us to feed into, and draw upon, the resources of our business partners within the IDEA segment: Christie Digital Systems, with its world leading projection technologies; Intel, GestureTek, Float4, Baanto, and others, with their innovative interactivity products; Quarry Integrated Communications, with extensive list of marquee clients and expert mentors; and IGLOO, with its extensive online community support.