At the heart of the mission of the Park donated by the City of London in Canadian Centre for Product Validation at Fanshawe College is helping innovators to quickly bring the future to life.
CCPV is a one-of-a-kind product development facility in Canada, offering a full suite of testing and validation services to clients ranging from start-ups to established veterans. CCPV guides product development from napkin sketches right through to production.
CCPV provides one-stop testing, proof of concept, design guidance, and failure analysis and develops custom-test protocols for leading-edge products. CCPV can even help clients access funding for product development and business expansion.
“There is nothing else like it in the country.We are an innovation centre with advanced testing capabilities,” said CEO Ben Cecil, who in his former role as Fanshawe’s vice-president academic, was part of a small team that led the creation of the centre.The primary mandate is driving job creation by setting London apart.
“We offer soup to nut services and work hand-in-hand with our clients to get their products to market as fast and cost effectively as possible.”
The centre has the equipment and expertise to conduct electrical, mechanical, performance, environmental, and thermal testing to thousands of global standards and has worked with more than 120 clients in medical and health devices, automotive, renewable energy, defence, aerospace and consumer goods sectors.
“We have the best of the breed in equipment, whether it’s environmental, acoustic, vibration or thermal. In some cases, we’ve got the biggest available in the province.”
CCPV’s experts work on anything from microscopic medical products to light-armoured vehicles. Students in Fanshawe’s engineering, business and marketing programs working on co-ops or as interns get real-world experience, interacting with clients on cutting-edge projects. Faculty can access the facility for research, capstones or curriculum.
The range of CCPV’s testing capabilities, its developmental focus and its mandate to partner with clients makes it a unique facility, says Cecil.
“Our business model is different.We have a high degree of connectivity with our clients.They feel as comfortable here as they do at their office or at home.”
Innovators see a future others miss, says Cecil.
“It’s our responsibility to be a transformative catalyst that propels their business forward. Innovators are big, bold thinkers who are always living in the future. The faster we can help them get a product to market, the faster they can get on to the next thing.”
CCPV is located on a 10-acre parcel of land in the Advanced Manufacturing recession.The City donated land to Fanshawe and to Western University to help new young companies get established and supported.”
Before CCPV, Fanshawe leaders were hearing from industry partners that there wasn’t enough support to bridge the innovation-to-commercialization gap, forcing them to spend too much time and money on testing and validation. The College decided in 2014 to scale up its existing capabilities to meet the need.
The college sought input from 160 partners on a proposal it presented to the federal government. Six months later, the college had a commitment for 50 per cent funding – $8.1 million – from FedDev Ontario.
Almost exactly a year later, in June 2016, CCPV opened for business.
And not a minute too soon, says Lynn Kincaid, a product engineer with a confidential Ottawa company. “Without CCPV, we could not do what we just achieved. We would have to go to the U.S. to get this product tested and that was not an option. CCPV gave us a technology sandbox and allowed us to play, to experiment and to discover.”
