Dr Tom Brzustowski University research supporting innovation

By Dr Tom Brzustowski

Since 1997, the Government of Canada has been investing in university research in science and engineering to help put Canadian R&D on track to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world. These investments have been part of a strategy, initially referred to as the “Innovation Agenda” and later formalized as the “Innovation Strategy”. In this context, innovation has to do with wealth creation by bringing new or significantly improved products to market.

The goal of the Innovation Strategy — perhaps never stated quite bluntly enough — is to provide Canada with the basis for sustained prosperity in the global economy of the 21st Century. We must have the means to invest adequately in health care, early childhood development, education, protection of the environment, and much else that reflects Canadian values.

We cannot assume that what we did to earn our high standard of living in the 20th Century will suffice to maintain it in the 21st. We must always look for new ways of creating wealth. We know that wealth is created when Canadians add value in producing goods and services that are sold in world markets, and we know that knowledge is the modern basis for adding value.

The government’s research investment strategy has succeeded extremely well. Universities have become the backbone of research in Canada, and the value of the R&D (mostly R) they are performing is nearly three times the total for the labs of the federal and provincial governments. At NSERC (Science and Engineering Research Canada), the clearest indicator of the government’s success has been the growing number of first- time applicants for discovery grants.

These are newly appointed professors who have been attracted to research in Canadian universities. This can be great news for Canada in the long term because these new people are very well qualified to develop their careers here, produce great research results, teach students, share their findings with industry and government, and help increase the amount of value-added activity in the Canadian economy.

University research in science and engineering supports value-added activity in the Canadian economy in three ways, and we are achieving excellence in all three. The first is the advanced training of highly-qualified people (HQP) — undergraduates interested in research, graduate students at the MA and PhD level, and postdoctoral fellows. Advanced training produces people who are current in an important area of science or engineering, can generate new knowledge, and know how to use it.

For that reason, HQP are often considered by industry to be the most important output of university research. They increase industry’s receptor capacity for new know-ledge. They are major players in the industrial R&D process that produces innovations. And, of course, they are the source of the next generation of researchers.

University-industry research partnerships are the second form of support. This is research with a market pull. It is done to solve industrial problems that can’t be solved with existing knowledge, and it may lead to product or process innovations within a couple of years. In this case, industry commercializes the research results. Canadian university-industry research has grown in both scale and impact over the last three decades, with about 500-600 companies acting as university partners in any given year, of which about 100 might be new to the program.

The cumulative total of industry investment in university research projects is now approaching a billion dollars. The professors involved in university-industry research often develop long-term relationships with their partners, such as Industrial Research Chairs, that can lead to significant innovations. Their students are particularly valuable to industry because they have learned what it means to use new knowledge productively.

The third way in which university research supports value-added activity in the economy is basic research, whose goal is only discovery. Basic research provides the foundation for all advances, and also trains people who can generate new knowledge in Canada and understand the new knowledge generated around the world. It must meet world standards of excellence to be valuable, and it does.

Occasionally, excellent basic research produces discoveries that lead to important innovations in the market. This has happened many times in many places around the world, and some of the greatest discoveries have changed our lives, e.g.: the transistor, the laser, the structure of DNA, etc. But innovations arising from basic research are unpredictable, they are slow in coming, and they may take decades to appear in new products.

Recently, the government has called for greater effort in “commercializing research results”, and producing “research-based innovations” as the required return to the taxpayers for their investment in university research. At times it appears that this attention is directed mainly at basic research, and sometimes the phrase “commercialization of basic research” appears in speeches by important people. However, we believe that the real goal behind the words is connecting research with wealth creation in Canada, in all the ways that are effective.

Commercializing the results of basic research is difficult, but it can succeed when done by the right people in the right conditions. It’s a technology-push process that starts in the university when someone recognizes innovation potential in a discovery. It requires several stages of risky private investment, adding up to many times the cost of the research. It often involves the creation of a start-up company, since there is seldom an industrial receptor capacity for something entirely novel.

But in spite of these difficulties, we do have some great Canadian success stories. In the publication “Research Means Business”, NSERC has documented 134 companies whose history begins with a grant for basic research first given a decade or more ago. These companies now have sales in the billions and employ thousands of HQP.

In Budget 2004, the Government of Canada called for a tripling in the effort to commercialize the results of university research. That is being done by growing the programs that work well, notably Intellectual Property Management (IPM) and Idea to Innovation (I2I). However, to increase the impact of university research in science and engineering on wealth creation in Canada in a big way, it is necessary to enhance all three ways in which it supports the national effort.

Dr Tom Brzustowski is president of Science and Engineering Research Canada (NSERC).