eMPOWR Canada forging ahead with campaign to boost Canada's research and training capacity for ICT sector

Fresh from its success in unifying its ambitious proposal to government, eMPOWR Canada is now refining its bid for funding to support expanded university research into strategic communications technologies. In the weeks ahead, the campaign's backers are working to establish the corporate entity that will oversee the initiative, and move their lobbying efforts into the political arena.

eMPOWR Canada (microelectronics, photonics, optoelectronics, wireless technologies and radio engineering) is squarely aimed at alleviating the chronic shortage of highly qualified personnel graduating from Canada's universities and colleges. It has already gained the support of a wide range of leaders in industry, academia and government, and reaction from senior Industry Canada officials has been extremely encouraging. Better still, the resolution of lingering differences over which disciplines the campaign would include in the final proposal has sharpened the campaign's message (R$, September 15/00).

Work is also focused on finalizing the amount of funding to be requested. Originally in the $550-600 million range, the request is now slightly below $500 million, and that figure may be readjusted once analysis is completed on a university needs conducted by The Impact Group.

"We've got the case pretty well put together, and there is a pretty good environment for this. There has been the Paul Martin speech (to the Toronto Board of Trade) and a lot of media focus on highly qualified personnel," says Dr Doug Barber, former CEO of Gennum Corp and co-chair of the eMPOWR task force. "We're asking the federal government to fund post-graduate research in the universities and colleges, and to use provincial programs in the IT (information technology) area to have more capacity in educate highly qualified personnel for industry."

Results from eMPOWR's research to date strongly indicate that a major initiative is required to boost the number of professors in the disciplines feeding into the IT and telecommunications sectors. The Canadian industry generates $116 billion annual revenue or more than 7% of the global average, but if the supply of HQP is not increased to meet demand, many fear Canadian firms will start to move operations to where the talent is located. That could mean a major loss in R&D power, since 46% of all private sector R&D is in the ICT area.

"Electrons, photons and electromagnetic waves. That's what it all comes down to. Industry wants people who know more about these areas," says a campaign insider. "The money we're asking for is to support research and capacity building in Canadian post-secondary institutions. Of course industry will benefit, because they will hire these people, but what's at stake is global leadership and opportunities for Canadians. That's why industry is at the table. They need people from the universities and the universities need researchers to train qualified people."

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) has traditionally provide funding for research in these areas, but ICT represents only a portion of what it is required to support, and chronic underfunding has restricted its ability to meet demand. Officials from NSERC and the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) have been following the eMPOWR initiative closely and all sides are working to avoid jurisdictional overlap and an increase in administrative burden.

Barber has spoken with representatives from NSERC and the NCE program and he says they acknowledge that a new entity must be created to achieve the goals of the eMPOWR initiative. "We have to do something innovative," he says. "We want to tap into and use the existing expertise and structure of NSERC and others because there's no sense in duplicating things. eMPOWR may also be a way of looking at how you build upon NCEs (once their 14-year funding envelope has expired) when they have been successful in stimulating economic activity in Canada."

NCE program director Jean-Claude Gavrell agrees that eMPOWR, NSERC and the NCE program have to work collaboratively to address the human capital dilemma facing Canadian industry. "They have to keep it simple and as small as possible, and use the existing infrastructure that's in place," says Gavrell. "It could be a body that uses a high level selection mechanism. The Canada Research Chairs Program (CRCP) does this, and then universities decide on the actual chair allocation."

In addition to co-chairing the eMPOWR task force with BCE Inc VP Dr Peter Nicholson, Barber also co-chairs a univer-sity consortium with Dr David Johnston, president of the Univ of Waterloo. The parallel initiative has secured the support of 14 universities and is determining the specific personnel needs of the education sector to meet eMPOWR's goal of tripling the number of professors devoted to ICT disciplines.

There are currently about 35,000 professors in the university system. Yet only 1,000 are teaching in ICT disciplines while less than half are teaching in eMPOWR disciplines, and they have little collective voice in the university community.

One of the ways the university consortium is working to increase the personnel pipeline is to encourage its member institutions to push their administrations to allocate more ICT and eMPOWR-related chairs for CRCP funding in their strategic plans.

eMPOWR is also working with Human Resources Development Canada to increase offshore recruitment efforts.

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