Making his mark: Mark Charbonneau turns mothballed school into idea incubator.

Mark Charbonneau wants to create a piece of high tech heaven. He imagines a loose-sleeved, symbiotic environment where scientists and entrepreneurs can gather to hatch great ideas over a cup of java.

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The CEO and founder of Sudbury's Testmark Laboratories Ltd. wants to work with young scientists and innovators with big ideas, but not necessarily the business savvy to bring their dreams to fruition.

They could learn more than test tube's worth of sage advice from the award-winning environmental monitoring lab.

Last October, Testmark moved from their cramped quarters in downtown Sudbury into new premises in suburban Garson, renovating a shuttered elementary school and creating the Sudbury Centre of Innovation and Technology (SCITech)

With 42,000 square feet at his disposal, Charbonneau intends to set aside half that space for a business incubator. Not one staffed with MBA-types with little real-world experience, but mentors who have been-there, done-that.

"We're trying to develop a nucleus of high-tech companies here that could benefit from being in the same building," says Charbonneau, 43, in creating "mutually beneficial relationships" for Testmark.

"The idea is more inventions are hatched over a cup of coffee than anything else. You share the same lunch room, you exchange ideas, you try to solve one another's problem," says Charbonneau. "My goals in setting up this building was to do that."

Charbonneau, who has managed laboratories in Canada, the U.S. and established a modern analytical laboratory in Ukraine to cleanup missile sites, began Testmark six years ago testing people's well water.

Today, the ISO 17025-certified lab has grown into a full-service facility testing water, air, soil and industrial samples from clients in 28 countries.

With four PhD-level scientists on staff, most of his 15 employees are chemical engineer technologists, many hired away from other Sudbury labs.

"There was no testing facility like this at all in Northern Ontario," says Charbonneau, who opted to shun free lab space in Toronto to raise his family in his hometown. "People thought I was nuts for setting up here."

Their bread and butter work is water quality testing, checking for pollutants, chloroflourocarbons (CFCs), Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), trace metals, pesticides and other chemicals.

With a substantial investment in equipment, one test method is taking the electronic fingerprint characteristics of molecules in water, oils, fish tissues or whatever industry wants tested, and matching it up with their computer library of 170,000 compounds.

Besides doing work for private industry, Environment Canada and the Sudbury Soils Study, Testmark analyses electrical transformer oils for utilities companies in the Panama Canal zone, to ensure they are operating properly.

"Everybody's got legislation they need to comply with, and we do that kind of testing."

Along the way, Testmark has been recognized with a Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce business start-up award and two years ago, Charbonneau took home the prestigious Karasek Award, an international honour presented to a scientist in analytical chemistry for outstanding contributions in his field.

Unlike other fledgling test labs or biotechnology companies crying for government start-up capital to cover expenses until they turn a profit, Charbonneau expresses pride his fee-for-service lab has been a self-financed operation.

"I don't believe in grant-repreneurs, I believe in entrepreneurs."

There is no marketing staff, no hard sales pitches. Charbonneau prefers to let his company's high quality work speak for itself.

"We've maintained our expenses and we just did it very conservatively and invested back in," says Charbonneau, by using sweat equity and 100-hour workweeks to generate the cash to buy testing equipment.

"We've built up capacity," says chemist John Scollard, Testmark's Director of Research and Development. "Let's build strategy," adds Charbonneau.

Testmark now wants to branch into biotechnology, specifically in the area of arthritic drugs, and expects to be hiring soon.

The company is also keeping its hand in research, working on a three-year collaborative effort with the University of Waterloo and the Ontario Centre of Excellence on age dating ground water.

Scollard says if drinking water is old--20 years or more--it has an extremely low contamination potential from a microbiology perspective since no bacteria lives longer than two months. From a pollution standpoint, water percolating through an aquifer tends to remove metals and other pollutants from water. They are also researching recharge rates for aquifers near Strathroy and Sturgeon Falls.

Charbonneau calls Ontario's new drinking water legislation a "double-edged sword." On one hand, it has created a higher standard of ethics and placed greater emphasis on laboratory licensing and accreditation. On the other hand, it created a mountain of paper work.

However, the drinking water program implemented is "world class" with test labs required to upload their client data directly into the Ministry of Environment's computer banks. As well, there is a system of intervention where the local medical officer of health is notified when any protocol is exceeded.

As the business has matured and the focus changes, Charbonneau says he remains excited about his work.

"As you age, your values change. Some people think everybody's after a destination, but I'm enjoying the journey and fixing the little troubles as they come up.

"People like to achieve and being able to do that is exciting. I walk here at night through the hallways and see the lights on and the machines humming and there's a great sense of satisfaction knowing you can create and build."

www.testmark.ca

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business