Primary aim to increase industry R&D

Industry Canada is betting that a relatively modest investment of $35-million in graduate student and post-doctoral fellow internships will help tackle three main objectives in its innovation and propsperity agendas: job creation, improved industrial productivity and increased business expenditures in R&D (BERD). The enhanced funding envelope — up from $14 million over two years as announced in the last federal Budget — will allow Mitacs to support nearly 5,000 internships at approximately 1,200 companies and develop several pilot projects that will see its reach and influence greatly expanded.

Mitacs was spun out of the original Mitacs Networks of Centres of Excellence (now Mprime) and has become a major force in the interface between academia and industry, providing industry with access to graduate students at a relatively modest cost.

Mitacs CEO and scientific director, Dr Arvind Gupta, says the decision to expand MITACS funding from two to five years came as a pleasant surprise. Mitacs was negotiating with Treasury Board on the terms and conditions of the two-year funding envelope announced in the Budget (R$, May 22/12) but "not the time lines.

"Industry Canada and Treasury Board made that decision, says Gupta, adding that the longer commitment also provides a major boost to his unofficial objective of creating 10,000 internship positions. "It's a long-term strategic goal and I won't give it up. That's the kind of deployment required for increasing BERD (business expenditures on R&D) and this is a very systematic way of doing it," says Gupta. "My sense is, if government is making this five-year commitment, it is also signalling that this is a long-term commitment."

The funding envelope is equal to the government's previous internship investment, which provided $30 million to Mitacs and $5 million to ConnectCanada, managed by the AUTO21 NCE in conjunction with the Univ of Windsor's Centre for Career Education (R$, May 2/11). That funding was delivered through the NCE's Industrial Research and Development Internships (IRDI) program. A mid-term review is currently underway, with site visits to Mitacs and ConnectCanada scheduled for March.

With the new funding, Mitacs will continue to develop several pilot projects that will see its reach and influence greatly expanded – all focused on the objective of increasing Canadian BERD. Its pilot cluster strategy is aimed at boosting impact by injecting specialized skills at various stages of a firm's R&D activities.

"Companies that have significant research challenges often don't know how to deal with them. We help them break it down and bring people in at the right time. We've got a good handle on this and we're negotiating with a few companies," says Gupta. "We want to build ourselves into their development. It's a huge value-add to them."

Under the Mitacs formula, each internship is measured as a unit of 4-6 months and a company can agree to take several units for each internship contracted.

trojan leading user of mitacs internships

A recent memorandum of understanding with London ON-based Trojan Technologies – a wholly owned subsidiary of Danaher Corp, Washington DC – is Mitacs' single largest internship project to date. Under the agreement, the world-leading developer of ultra violet water purification systems – will co-fund 100 four-month internships over the next four years, with 54 already approved or submitted.

"They (Trojan) want to build us into their development. It's of huge value to them," says Gupta. "We provide a cluster of interns to solve problems. Interns say they learn more in multidiscplinary group setting which pulls various disciplines together."

With 30 PhDs on its research staff, Trojan engages in an annual strategic planning exercise to identify technology needs for the coming year. After determining what can be handled in-house, Trojan contacts its Mitacs supervisor to source the requisite talent, drawing on Western Univ, Univ of Guelph, McMaster Univ and Univ of Toronto.

"The biggest value of Mitacs is to be able to get access to expertise quickly that is not available in the company," says Dr Domenico Santoro, a senior research scientist and research team leader at Trojan. "It helps us build collaborations with universities in a way that's extremely effective and we can always add new universities as we go. There's a huge appetite for this type of expertise at Trojan"

Trojan is utilizing the Mitacs program for expertise in areas such as biology, chemistry and engineering, as well as mathematics and physics. Santoro says the company tends to hire post-docs and keep them on for one to two years.

"We bring in a mix of expertise but post-docs tend to work out better. They're free of campus commitments and they're also more qualified," he says. "We use the program as much as we can to accelerate innovation. We're excited about its potential and will use it intensively for the next five years."

The Accelerate program is also proving a valued source for future personnel. Trojan has already hired a previous intern and is grooming another for full time employment. Another major user of Mitacs internships – Vancouver-based Recon Instruments Inc – has used the program to add to its employment base. At the press conference announcing the new Mitacs funding, Gary Goodyear – minister of state for science and technology – noted that Recon's first intern, Dr Reynald Hoskinson, was retained by the firm and is now its manager of R&D.

breaking into new industry sectors

Another Mitacs Accelerate pilot is designed to expand internships into industries that traditionally don't spend much on R&D. Gupta says they are looking at replicating their initial success with the construction industry with the mining sector.

"We're actively talking to the mining sector through the Canadian Mining Innovation Council," he says. "More preliminary discussions are underway in sectors such as forestry, transportation (ports), agri-foods and food manufacturing. We're being systematic about it."

Perhaps even more ambitious is Mitacs' attempts to better engage the social sciences research community. It is working with a group of professor from the social sciences disciplines to "identify where the innovation bottlenecks are". Innovation policy work by companies holds particular potential.

"How do companies relate to customer and to government? How is technology used and adopted? This is where we get real traction with the social sciences," says Gupta. "It's moving a little too slowly for my taste but we're making progress."

ConnectCanada

The AUTO21/ConnectCanada internship program has nearly 100 graduates either placed or pending with automotive companies as well as those in the advanced manufacturing category, including aerospace, construction and green technologies.

And like Mitacs, ConnectCanada has also found internship opportunities for humanities and business students in marketing roles and other non-technical areas.

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