Bob Mighell is a serial entrepreneur who has spent nearly four decades building, scaling, and exiting companies. His first, Edge Snowboards, launched in 1985 at the start of the snowboard revolution. He then spent 20 years running World Medical Equipment, which outfitted surgical suites with high-end capital equipment and made the Puget Sound Business Journal's list of fastest-growing private companies eight times. He went on to found Tilting Motor Works to commercialize his own patents on tilting three-wheeled vehicles, sold it to publicly traded Arcimoto, and set two FIM world land speed records for three-wheeled motorcycles at the Bonneville Salt Flats. After nearly three years as entrepreneur in residence at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business, he did something unusual: he moved to Canada. He is now founder and CEO of Chondros Bio, a UBC spinout developing a regenerative hydrogel implant to repair cartilage and bone, and mentors startups with Creative Destruction Lab and Entrepreneurship@UBC. He holds engineering degrees from Dartmouth and an MBA from the University of Washington.

In this conversation, Bob and Natalie start with what two decades of selling into operating rooms taught him. In the US, he sold directly to the OR supervisors who held the purse strings. In Canada, buying decisions sat at the provincial level, and offering refurbished equipment at a third to half the cost of new, with an equal or better warranty, got no traction at all. He then takes us inside university tech transfer, where he estimates 80 to 85% of IP sits in a folder because no one is there to champion it. UBC did something rare: it combed its own portfolio and recruited an outside founder to commercialize a promising technology. He explains why the license is the company, why his first term sheet was a deal-breaker, and why universities move at a very different speed from business.

The conversation turns to capital and the road to market. Chondros Bio faces a seven-to-eight-year path to FDA approval, which means finding patient investors. A competitor's approval, and its roughly $330 million acquisition by Smith & Nephew, cleared both a regulatory and a reimbursement path for him. He is candid about why medtech goes south first: approval costs about the same in Canada as in the US, for a market a tenth the size. He knows three Canadian-founded companies that moved to the US for funding, one of which reincorporated in Delaware for US investors.

His one ask of Ottawa is a Canadian SBIR: true grants companies can draw on like an ATM, rather than matching or reimbursement funding that forces founders to find the money first. Without it, he warns, the US researchers Canada is now recruiting may do their science here and build their companies back home. He closes on a personal note: married to a Canadian, he's here to stay, and so is Chondros Bio for as long as he can keep it here.

This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility.

If this shifted how you think about Canada's innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

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