Dr Peter Hackett

Two Solitudes or Three?

By Dr Peter Hackett

Not too long ago, you could have spoken of federal and private sector research as two solitudes. When you consider Canadian universities, and how those researchers weren’t connecting much with either government or industrial research, maybe we should have said three solitudes. And when you take into account the way in which federal departments and agencies failed to talk to one another about their research, you could speak about hundreds of solitudes.

“Two solitudes” has a familiar ring for Canadians. Hugh MacLennan took the title of his book from Rainer Maria Rilke’s phrase: “… the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

Solitudes are not important, but the way they work together is. The Federal Partners in Technology Transfer (FPTT) has helped ensure that we get better at touching and greeting one another, and working with each other.

Technology transfer is important because it creates public value. Often value creation depends upon confluence of events and ideas — bringing solitudes together. In Ottawa back in the 1980s, people theorized you could use both photons and electrons on a single microchip – solid-state opto-electronics. This wasn’t just the leading edge of technology. It was the bleeding edge. You would hemorrhage your company’s cash flow if you tried to perform the R&D to test the concept. No company would have dared try it by itself, but the federal labs could try. In 1987, the National Research Council (NRC) and Bell Northern Research, with funding from Industry Canada, put together a consortium of firms and researchers from governments laboratories and universities. The result was prototype transmitters and receivers for wavelength division multiplexing, which today underlies a multi-billion dollar industry. And Ottawa is arguably the centre of the global industry. This is public value.

Global revenue realized from intellectual property licensing is about $110 billion today, up from about $15 billion in the late 1980s. Intellectual property (IP) is a key to competitive advantage. But too few people understand this. And too few companies or government agencies have an IP strategy. Ten years ago, this oversight was understandable. Ten years from now, it will be inexcusable.

I’m especially interested in how we can get innovation out of government research facilities and into the private sector where it can create value, but there are enormous barriers. Sometimes the rules get in the way of effective partnerships and efficient technology transfer. We need to change these rules.

We need to take steps to foster a climate of entrepreneurship in our organizations and give government entrepreneurs the flexibility they need to succeed. We need to find ways to reward our entrepreneurs or they will leave. Individual entrepreneurs must be given the chance to win big. We need to keep getting better at commercializing our technologies, and helping others to commercialize theirs. Last year, the federal government invested over $6 billion in research. Will we get $6 billion in public value from that IP? Five years from now, that answer better be yes. Ten years from now, the answer should be double or triple that impact.

I believe we’ve made enormous progress at NRC in recent years in moving innovation out of our labs and out into the marketplace, but we don’t do it on our own. Technology transfer and new company creation are never done in isolation. We need more partnerships with business, with universities, and with other government departments and agencies.

We need to re-examine the barriers to participation of federal researchers in integrated research networks. And we need to examine the barriers to the participation of federal researchers in private sector ventures. If we are to realize the full return on federal investment and create public value for Canadians, we must integrate the Canadian research enterprise. All the solitudes must protect and touch and greet one another.

This article is an abridged version of an address to the Federal Partners in Technology Transfer awards dinner on May 30, 2001.

Peter Hackett is VP Research at the National Research Council