Academia-industry partnership aims to boost mobile development

By Perry Hoffman

Several Ontario academic institutions and a number of wireless and content companies have banded together to form the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC), an organization whose goal is to develop a centre of excellence for applied research, design and commercialization in Ontario's mobile content and services sector.

The MEIC is led by the Ontario College of Art and Design and chaired by OCAD's president Sara Diamond. With funding from the Ontario Media Development Corp. (OMDC) under the Entertainment and Creative Clusters Partnership Fund, the organization is currently in Phase 1 — a fact-finding mode — trying to get an overall picture of Ontario's mobile and content sectors as well as their strengths and weaknesses. In about two months, MEIC will release a research report detailing the findings.

MEIC coordinator Michele Perras says that when the initiative started last December, the goal was to find out if an industry-led research lab with a focus on mobile content, services and applications — and close ties to academia — would be possible and feasible in Ontario. While the group already has an idea on what areas to focus, Perras says that information isn't going to be immediately released.

The organization is also asking stakeholders in the mobile and content industries, including academia and large companies to complete an industry survey. Results will help shape the direction of the MEIC. As the name suggests, this is less about wireless research than it is about developing innovative things to do with wireless communications. Perras says wireless is the thread that ties together a whole host of activities.

"It's the idea that we are mobile, working through a connected environment," she says. "And what is the design and the experience of that environment, what could it be and do we have the capabilities to be able to build it out."

Phase 2 of the MEIC's development has only just started to take shape as the organization has applied for additional funding from the OMDC. The second stage will also vet and kick start projects resulting from opportunities and recommendations detailed in the first phase report as well as discussions with internal working groups and advisory committees.

"The intent is to launch into actual project work whether it's research or prototyping," Perras says, "and then the findings from these research and prototyping initiatives will be put forth as public or semi-public documents."

Transitioning Ontario's economy

With Ontario taking a beating economically as a result of thousands of job cuts in the manufacturing sector, the idea of pushing for an increase in mobile- and content-related economic output makes sense. Perras says that the MEIC is working with the government on two fronts: university/college student training and business transition.

Partnering academia and industry together is a good way to train knowledge workers and entrepreneurs of the future, she says, noting that the MEIC is exploring ways to give university and college students and those coming out in the next five years, the skills to better deal with the realities of the marketplace.

"They will be learning things that are current — not necessarily learning how to program or to develop products — but they're learning to think on their feet and that's the kind of thing that is very difficult to teach in a traditional academic environment. So can we help to facilitate that by providing internships and research associateships on prototyping projects, on research projects that are led by industry," says Perras.

The MEIC can also help budding entrepreneurs in the mobile and content areas for example, which should help Ontario diversify its economy base. "So it is helping to ease that transition from a manufacturing-based economy towards things that are more knowledge-based by providing knowledge sharing, networking, match making, or any kind of research, prototyping or any other kind of incubation initiative," she says.

The MEIC also contributes to the federal government's Science and Technology Strategy, which identified information and communications technologies (ICT) as one of four priority research areas for Canada. In September, the government's Science, Technology and Innovation Council identified new media, wireless, broadband and telecom equipment as sub-priority areas within ICT, which could result in these sectors receiving special attention from research granting councils within the Industry Canada portfolio.

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