Funding issues loom as CMC, CANARIE and Precarn highlight the enabling benefits of their 4th pillar status

Aim to underpin Innovation Strategy

Three national, not-for-profit corporations operating within the critical interface between university research and industry are banding together to explore the potential for increased collaboration and to raise awareness for their self-described 4th pillar organizations. Executives from the Canadian Microelectronics Corp, Precarn Inc and CANARIE Inc hope their combined efforts will substantially contribute the federal Innovation Strategy’s top priority of enabling commercialization of university research. It could also result in expanded mandates and enhanced funding.

By combining the efforts of the three organizations, the groups hope the federal government — their primary funder — will heed the message they’re delivering with renewed mandates and even additional funding to allow for an increased scope of their activities.

The thinking behind the concept of 4th pillar organizations was developed by Dr Brian Barge, CMC’s president and CEO and first publicly articulated last year in RE$EARCH MONEY (R$, September 16/02). The idea quickly attracted the involvement of Dr Anthony Eyton, president and CEO of Precarn and Dr Andrew Bjerring, president and CEO of CANARIE. The three executives have been meeting regularly and recently outlined their roles as 4th pillar organizations at the Federal Partners in Technology Transfer Conference in Ottawa.

The concept for 4th pillar organizations is simple yet elegant, raising the profile of CMC, Precarn and CANARIE at the critical juncture between academic research and its application in the marketplace. The commercialization gap has become the highest priority of the emerging Innovation Strategy currently under development within Industry Canada and is the subject of widespread debate throughout government, academia and the private sector.

“At the end of the day, the highest level objective is to bring quality organizations with credible track records to help Canada achieve, in the best possible fashion, higher levels of productivity and competitiveness,” says Barge. “That’s where it’s at and that’s what we’re in place to do. Too little do we talk about this, and here are organizations that do it. We’re agile, focused and have that ability.”

The 4th pillar proponents contend that their status as national organizations with complementary skill sets and deep contacts in all three sectors (the other three pillars of innovation), offers an ideal opportunity for government to make strides towards achieving the targets set out in the Innovation Strategy.

CMC has gained international recognition for its work enabling and multiplying the impact of microelectronics and micro-systems research and spreading its benefits throughout the economy. In recent years, it has established two national collaborative research networks and has begun expanding into new sectors, as evidenced by its recent foray into biomedical research via an agreement with Edmonton-based Micralyne Inc. (see page 7).

Precarn has a successful track record of managing national research projects involving a diverse range of applications, each of which include a private sector end user. The relevance of robotics and intelligent systems to virtually every sector of the economy places Precarn in a powerful position to capitalize on the trend towards industry outsourcing of research to universities and colleges.

CANARIE is the world leader in high-speed broadband research networking, enabling advances in research in virtually every area requiring massive computing power. CA*net 4 is billed as the world’s first all-optical research network and CANARIE is active in program funding, making groundbreaking inroads into applications for e-business, e-learning, e-health and e-content.

“There are desperate needs for organizations like ours to expand what we offer. We’re trying to take advantage of the momentum coming out of the Toronto Innovation Summit and be seen as a strategic element of getting Canada from 15th to 5th,” says Precarn’s Eyton. “We can migrate research from university laboratories to the private sector and commercialization channels. We also help to create innovative companies by sharing the risk. It’s like pre-venture capital money that’s absolutely critical for companies to reach the next stage.”

The three organizations are also bound by a more pressing consideration — expiring funding. Core funding for CANARIE lapses it the end of the current FY. CMC and Precarn face the same situation at the end of FY04-05. Precarn and CANARIE are funded directly by Industry Canada while CMC receives its base funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, with flow-through funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Since their inception, they have collectively received $550 million in government funding.

Taken separately, the organizations have a relatively low profile with government, making it difficult to argue their cases for continued funding. In the last federal Budget, Precarn and CANARIE were hopeful that their mandates would be renewed and possibly expanded, but they came away empty handed.

CANARIE is closest to the the end of its funding cycle and has fully committed the $82 million it received for its applications development programs. The pressures aren’t as severe for CMC and Precarn, but the latter is already turning away proposals that would otherwise be funded.

“As fourth pillar organizations, we are presenting an important theme that should be heard by policy people in government. We want to raise awareness and test the concept,” says CANARIE’s Bjerring. “The focus at this point is not immediately on securing funding as identifying the themes and principles of (respective) stakeholders and articulating them at the national level. We’re flexible and willing to change our ways of doing things because we’ve evolved and changed over the last 10 years and this will continue.”

To date, reaction to the 4th pillar concept within Industry Canada has been positive but muted, an understandable reaction given the turbulent political atmosphere.

“It’s a neat way of presenting the key features of the organizations and how they fit with all the other groups in the S&T community,” says André St-Pierre, DG of Industry Canada’s innovation, information and communications technologies branch. “I will certainly bring it up in policy discussions in the coming weeks and months. We should recognize the role that fourth pillar organizations play as opposed to these organizations in isolation. They have synergies and strength when they come together.”

In a move to encourage increased collaboration among themselves, CMC, Precarn and CANARIE have become official members of each others’ organizations. CMC’s Barge says there will undoubtedly be instances where the organizations can work together.

“The cost and complexity of research will drive infrastructure into fewer and fewer locations and to get at them you need electronics (CMC) and cyber infrastructure which is CANARIE,” he says. “With respect to Precarn, human intelligence can be embodied by writing software and in hardware like microchips. It’s just natural that sophisticated, intelligent devices for the future will marry up somehow. Convergence is moving our software and hardware system to a higher level.”

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