Mitacs aims to increase internships to 10,000 by 2020

Mitacs wants to boost the impact and reach of its cooperative innovation model by more than doubling the number of graduate student internships it supports to 10,000 by 2020. The target, while not new, is the cornerstone of its new strategic plan — Target 10,000: Talent, Ideas, Networks — and will require a far greater investment than it has received in previous years.

The strategy contends that sharply increasing the number of internships is essential for achieving the kind of transformational change required to fully develop Canada's knowledge-based economy. It eschews the traditional push and pull models of innovation in favour of emphasizing shared objectives in which "both parties (industry and university researchers) contribute to the production and adoption of research outcomes".

The Mitacs strategy commits to expanding its Converge (connecting universities with large and smaller firms) and its Indigenous Communities Engagement pilot programs by 2020. It also wants to enhance its platform approach to innovation by quadrupling the number of agreements with graduate degree programs and industry.

To date, Mitacs has been enthusiastically received by many of its industrial partners.

"Mitacs provides a unique opportunity for young scientists to perform R&D work in an industrial setting, not only leveraging technical expertise acquired in their university, but also actively helping to facilitate the academic-industry collaboration," says Dr Bruce Carpick, Sanofi Pasteur's director of Biochemistry, Analytical R&D North America. "The key to the Mitacs program is its flexibility. This is very important to my team, and industry in Canada in general, because of the challenging, dynamic business environment we operate in. Mitacs is designed to meet the needs of the company, the university, and, most importantly, the people who make them run. In our case at least, it's a big "win-win".

Over its 15-year history, Mitacs has grown from a mathematics-focused internship program to a full-blown innovation engine with working collaborations throughout the Canadian economy and internationally. In recent years it has received budget top-ups of $56.4 million over four years and $14 million over two years targeting its Globalink program.

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