How does a large global business think and act like a start-up?
Thomson Reuters + Communitech
By partnering with innovators and disruptors to create and accelerate the next big ideas and businesses.
Thomson Reuters Labs around the world collaborate with start-ups to rapidly prototype and validate solutions using data science and lean techniques, and with customers to solve big problems and challenges. Working with external partners, Thomson Reuters Labs are active members of regional innovation ecosystems, creating world-class solutions for our customers.
Thomson Reuters Labs – Waterloo Region in Ontario, Canada, enjoys a vibrant partnership with our site host, Communitech. This industry-led innovation center of nearly 1,000 companies is at the heart of the Toronto-area innovation and technology community.
The Lab has two primary objectives:
- Innovation through applied research and experimentation on Thomson Reuters vast and unique data sets, helping to produce solutions for Thomson Reuters customers.
- Collaboration with academics, students and start-ups to put new technologies into practice, and meet the business challenges faced by Thomson Reuters customers.
Working closely with colleagues across the company in our financial and risk, legal and tax and accounting businesses, in 2016 the Lab partnered on numerous initiatives with start-ups, including:
Blue J Legal
An exclusive joint initiative to bring Tax Foresight, a new suite of artificial intelligence-based tax case outcome predictors, to Canadian corporate tax professionals, tax preparers, accountants and tax lawyers on the Thomson Reuters Taxnet Pro® platform.
Overbond
The first fully integrated platform for the bond origination market that directly connects corporate and government issuers with dealers, institutional investors and select retail investors.
TickSmith
The first commercial big data platform for financial data, used to deliver innovative data management and analytic solutions to participants in the brokerage ecosystem including trading groups, exchanges, data vendors, regulators and brokerage firms.
We chose to launch in the Waterloo Region due to its robust innovation ecosystem and the ability to bring together the energy of a world-class university, game-changing start-up companies and global industry collaborations.
The growing Thomson Reuters Labs network
The Lab in Waterloo is one of six around the world.
Boston
In Boston’s Innovation District, we work with the region’s robust start-up community and world-class universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
London
In the the heart of London’s Canary Wharf financial district, we partner with start-ups and top universities in the region and collaborate with customers to experiment with new business solutions.
Zurich Region
Our Zurich Data Lab accelerates enterprise-level innovation projects in areas such as digital currency and blockchain technologies.
Cape Town
In Cape Town’s Bandwidth Barn, our South Africa Lab, launched in 2016, works at the center of the region’s start-up and FinTech ecosystem.
Waterloo Region
The Lab is located in Communitech, an accelerator in the heart of the region’s startup ecosystem. The Lab works closely with the University of Waterloo on research and leverages the school’s elite co-op program to bring new ideas and new ways of thinking.
Singapore
Located in Singapore’s Central Business District, the Singapore Lab leverages the vibrant innovation and FinTech ecosystem in Singapore to drive experimentation and fuel collaborative projects across Asia.
Thomson Reuters Labs is an engine of innovation for our company, leveraging creative partnerships to deliver real solutions for our customers. Through our growing Labs network, we continue to connect Thomson Reuters best-in-class data sets and professional expertise with innovation communities around the globe.
Partnering in research and talent
The Canada Lab also partners closely with the University of Waterloo, with its extraordinary pool of mathematical and computer science talent. Students and faculty gain opportunities for research, innovation and start-up projects; entrepreneurial contests; and mentoring. The university connection also involves Thomson Reuters in the school’s elite co-op program.
Wide-ranging collaboration
Thomson Reuters and the University of Waterloo have joined forces to fuel breakthroughs in data science and develop the next generation of global entrepreneurial leaders.
A Thomson Reuters-funded Research Chair in Data Cleaning from Theory to Practice supports initial research into new methods for storing, cleaning and curating data, as well as overcoming the problem of data silos to help businesses make better use of their data.
A joint collaboration on the Problem Lab with the Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology Centre at Waterloo helps students find and understand important problems – the critical, but often overlooked, first step of entrepreneurial innovation.
The Thomson Reuters Labs – Waterloo Region has also created four positions for undergraduate and graduate-level Waterloo students (three co-op positions in UX design, data science and start-up engagement, and a Ph.D. internship in data science). Another full-time position is coming for a master’s or Ph.D. graduate.
Thomson Reuters and the University of Waterloo are teaming up to support Canada’s global competitiveness as a leader in the knowledge-and-technology economy. Our organizations are united in our commitment to producing talent and technology to help realize the best possibilities of the Information Age.
Toronto Technology Centre
Thomson Reuters further announced in 2016 our creation of a new Technology Centre in Toronto, to incorporate cognitive computing and artificial intelligence into our next generation of products. Part of our broader strategy of networked Labs around the world (including Waterloo), this initiative will connect with Communitech as well as local start-ups, while our data scientists leverage the technology corridor connecting the Waterloo region to Toronto.
The Toronto Technology Centre will allow Thomson Reuters to co-locate technology talent to drive productivity, increase flexibility and encourage cross-enterprise innovation. The Toronto-Waterloo Region Corridor is one of the largest technology clusters in the world and offers a rich mix of emerging and mature technology talent, and a robust pipeline of graduates from local universities. Proximity to large and strategic customers will also enable rapid, customer-driven innovation, particularly in Toronto’s fast-growing FinTech community.
Our new Technology Centre furthers our commitment to growing Canada’s preeminent hub of innovation, and to building the customer-centric platforms and solutions of the future.
… an example of how great things can happen when the public and private spheres work together …