Getting from 15th to 5th - what will it take?

By H.Douglas Barber and Jocelyn Ghent Mallett

"We must strive for Canada to become one of the top five countries for research and development performance by 2010." - Speech from the Throne, January 30, 2001

Over the past decade, Canada's highest GERD to GDP ratio was 1.74%. This occurred in 1994 and it's been slipping ever since. For the past five years, we've been hovering at around 1.65%. To move Canada from its current 15th place in global R&D performance to a 5th place ranking over the next decade will require an enormous effort. It means attaining a GERD/GDP ratio of about 2.6%, a 60% increase over the present performance.

The Government is not unaware of the size of the task. "This is a challenge for all Canadians but in particular for the private sector as the largest research investor in Canada." Correct. The Government sets the goal, but the private sector is expected to deliver. As its contribution, the Government has pledged to at least double the current federal investment in R&D by 2010. This would add $3.3 billion per year by 2010, without inflation. But the increment needed is more like $20B per year! And that would require over 100,000 new researchers, not to mention at least another 100,000 people to move resulting innovations into the marketplace.

So how do we get there? To date, the Government's plan for its new doubled investment focuses on: "strengthening the research capacity of Canadian universities and government laboratories...accelerating Canada's ability to commercialize research discoveries, supporting more collaborative international research [and] strategically targetted research" in areas like life sciences and the environment.

However, if the Government is really serious about augmenting our national R&D performance, it also has to concentrate on the future needs of an industry that is outperforming every other in R&D investment. Information and communications technology (ICT) is the single largest contributor to R&D in the Canadian economy. Companies in this sector perform 47% of all industrial R&D - $4.7B annually. ICT has an excellent track record of growth as a result of working with universities to commercialize new discoveries, and of converting R&D investment into products and services for the world market.

Yet this sector, and particularly the advanced technology fields that drive it, will not be able to continue to deliver the expected R&D performance. Its development - especially the growth of the driver technologies of microelectronics, photonics and wireless (the eMPOWR sector, which alone contributes 28% of R&D) - is hampered by the lack of people skilled at performing industrial research. Looking out five years, surveys show a grievous 70% shortfall between what our universities expect to graduate and what companies require.

While recognizing that "Canada will only realize its full potential by investing aggressively in the skills and talents of its people," the federal Government has yet to make a clear connection between R&D performance and numbers of skilled people. At the current level of fewer than 1,000 professors in ICT disciplines, Canadian universities will turn out only about 30,000 graduates through the remainder of the decade. We need to at least triple that number!

Canada will get from 15th place to 5th only if federal and provincial governments take strategic action now in the areas of greatest economic opportunity. Government partners must aim at strengthening the research capacity of Canadian universities in fields that are critical to achieving its goal.

Universities do 22% of Canada's R&D, but less than 5% of this effort is devoted to ICT, choking off a much larger flow of trained researchers to industry. If they can get the people, the companies in this sector will be able to at least double their contribution to Canada's overall R&D goals. But if our people-generating capacity is not enhanced via strategically targetted research, the presence of the ICT/ eMPOWR industry in this country will diminish, and the Canadian GERD/GDP ratio will stagnate or slip even further. The urgency of embarking on a truly collaborative, private/public sector approach to this critical challenge cannot not be underestimated.

Douglas Barber and Jocelyn Ghent Mallett are leading proponents behind the eMPOWR initiative (R$, December 20/00)