By Alexandre Navarre

Alexandre Navarre, PhD, MBA, is former Quebec manager for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a member of the board of the CCTT (Collegial Center of Technology Transfer) Novika and the incubator CEIM (Centre d’entreprises et d’innovation de Montréal).

Canada is facing, decade after decade, an uphill challenge in innovation while its academic research results are deemed to be of outstanding quality. This begs some questions as to the focus of funded research, the support for ensuing commercialization activities and the alignment between academic research fields and industrial needs.

Digging into the research fabric in Canada, three major innovative streams are present: industry, universities and, not to be underestimated, colleges.

University innovations are dependent on public grants and research contracts, often from larger companies. Contracts are traditionally shrinking in times of economic uncertainty.

Colleges, on the other hand, have more and more positioned themselves to serve small and medium-sized enterprises and to provide fast responses to pressing industrial challenges.

While colleges do not push for science frontiers, they have proven to be a partial substitute to industry innovation requirements.

Because industry has for several decades disengaged itself from R&D activities, not just in Canada, colleges have increasingly bridged the gap. This creates a new competitive pressure for universities in terms of research contract sources.

Canadian colleges, polytechnics and Quebec’s cégeps have managed to bridge a widening gap within what some feel to be the low end of research activities: requests, especially from SMEs, to develop short-term solutions as their markets expand. This activity is not necessarily appealing to the mindset of technological sophistication prevalent in university circles.

Colleges’ insertion into the research fabric of the country is not so recent but has benefited increasingly from federal and provincial programs that used to be solely oriented towards university researchers.

In fact, a number of such programs from federal agencies (such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Innovation Foundation) and provincial agencies are aimed at promoting collaborations between colleges and universities.

In addition, some colleges have equipped themselves with technology transfer units and even entered alliances with business incubators.

They learned that while their expertise is generally specialized in specific domains, they would become more efficient by partnering with each other, providing industry with teams that mimic their specific knowledge requirements.

No wonder some colleges (there are 213 colleges and polytechnics in Canada) now have research budgets that are exceeding those of smaller universities.

For instance, the Cégep of La Pocatière, located in the Lower St. Lawrence, has three affiliated CCTTs (Centre collégial de transfert de technologie). One of the CCTTs, Novika, has over 50 employees, mostly researchers and technicians, managing about $10 million in yearly contracts. 

R&D by colleges, polytechnics and cégeps responds to industry's needs 

The Canadian industry’s shift from doing R&D towards funding R&D activities has therefore found in colleges and cégeps a substitute combination that seems to respond to their needs: speed, practical excellence and flexibility.

Instead of thesis timeframes typical of university research projects, polytechnics and CCTTs are delivering often smaller but much more numerous stage-gate projects.

University researchers may have held their college counterparts in some sort of disdain, but in today's reality they may be poised to change their attitudes.

The complementarity of focus, methodological rigour, instrumentation and network is all playing towards improved partnerships.

Furthermore, colleges have hired over the years more apt researchers and encouraged them to pursue some research activities that are recognized and factored to relieve them from other educational duties. As a result, the attraction and retention of academic highly qualified personnel has increased over the years – a direct benefit to their teaching content and to their students.

In the meantime, industrial R&D has been lagging in Canada and one should wonder what policies might induce its sustained activities in the future.

In the progressive disconnection from the U.S. economy that has emerged recently, diversification of our markets is likely to translate into an acceleration of innovation and technological adaptation.

This creates new opportunities for collegial research activities, beyond SMEs.

Startups are a way to rapidly reach emerging markets. They generate technology-oriented contracts, although they are financially riskier for the institutions – a risk that government programs should mitigate.

University spinoffs are potentially a great source as well of such contracts. This virtuous cycle that feeds back into the academic research pipeline is changing the outlook colleges have had towards startups and may provide further long-term benefits to them in addition to jobs for their students.

In fact, colleges have benefited from their intellectual property policy. The IP they generate through their partnership contracts are generally being transferred to the sponsor, as well as prior art and know-how.

However, since some colleges are also receiving public research funding without strings attached, their policies may have to adapt to technologies that may be applied to different domains. This subsidized approach that benefits mostly SMEs is only possible because of our publicly funded collegial activities and should be sustained in the future.

Perhaps the real lesson from the recent geopolitical turmoil is that any country should strive to be independent and self-sufficient, only choosing partners that can provide complementarity (without other objectives, such as growth for growth, control or conquest).

It is a real paradigm shift that includes the notion of “small is beautiful.” As such, colleges, polytechnics and cégeps can play a determinant role in expanding the scope and competitiveness of their regional industrial clients.

Governments have to in turn adapt their policies to continue effectively promoting service-oriented colleges in their essential role in accompanying SMEs and resolving their technological challenges.

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