NORCAT celebrates 20 years of success in Sudbury: Cambrian College technology centre eyes future growth.

AuthorMigneault, Jonathan
PositionNEWS

Sudbury's Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT) started in a basement room at Cambrian College in 1995, but has since expanded in scope and size to a multi-million-dollar facility over its 20-year history.

Founder Darryl Lake returned for the first time since his 2012 retirement to the facility and organization he helped build to celebrate NORCAT's 20th anniversary, Oct. 2.

Lake started his career as an educator, and created NORCAT to keep young, talented people in the North.

"We were losing these good people," he said. "The demographic was moving out."

In the early 1990s, many of Sudbury's youth, he said, moved to Toronto for work and never returned.

He and his colleague Glenn Crombie were inspired by innovation centres in Finland, and tailored those models for Northern Ontario.

NORCAT's initial focus was to nurture talent in Sudbury's mining sector.

The centre developed a series of training and development programs to serve the mining, manufacturing, oil and gas, health-care, and construction sectors.

Early on, NORCAT had the support of industry partners and government, in particular the province's Sector Partnership Fund.

Lake credits former Finance Minister Floyd Laughren, and former Northern Development and Mines Minister Rick Bartolucci, for much of NORCAT's early success.

In 2009, NORCAT moved to its 70,000-square-foot facility on Maley Drive thanks to $14 million in donations from private and public partners.

When Lake retired in 2012, Don Duval, a former executive at the MaRS...

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