Mitacs' stature grows as Budget boosts funding and adds new responsibilities

The Budget's announcement of an additional $8 million for Mitacs extends the remarkable evolution of the organization into a key tool for delivering academic-industry collaboration and on-the-job skills training. The new funding goes towards Mitacs' Elevate program, a three-year-old pilot designed to boost the R&D management skills of postdoctoral students by providing a mix of classroom and real-world training.

Launched in Ontario in 2009 and expanded nationally in 2012, Elevate has spent $23 million to date for postdoctoral fellows to develop R&D management expertise while working on cutting-edge research projects in an industrial setting. Data show that 19% of US R&D managers have advanced degrees compared to 11% in Canada.

"We're getting wonderful outcomes and high retention rates with many moving into management positions. Elevate turns people's minds around for future careers towards industry," says Dr Arvind Gupta, Mitacs CEO and scientific director. "We've talked to CEOs and they can't find people to manage their R&D. At about 150 people, companies need someone to manage their R&D effort as the business case is longer term and more speculative."

Single delivery agent

The Budget also announced that Mitacs would become the single delivery agent for federal postdoctoral industrial R&D fellowship support, coinciding with the winding down of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council's (NSERC) Industrial R&D Fellowships (IRDF) program, which had a budget of $6.4 million in FY12-13.

A third change is the decision to extend Mitacs funding to "eligible not-for-profit organizations with an economic orientation".

With the new Elevate funding, Mitacs' annual budget exceeds $40 million from federal and provincial sources, complemented by millions in industry contributions. Funding is delivered through five programs: Elevate, Step, Enterprise, Globalink and Accelerate.

"We've tried hard not to have program proliferation. We want to keep the program suite simple yet flexible enough under each program as possible," says Gupta, who was a member of the Jenkins Expert Panel for the Review of Federal Support to R&D. "The Budget make a direct link to the Jenkins Panel which was all about demand-driven innovation and the design of fewer flexible programs."

The elimination of the NSERC's IRDF and decision to provide the agency with $15 million in non-directed A-based funding marks a significant turning point in how the government views and supports the S&T ecosystem. Gupta says the Budget can be interpreted as a "strong hint for support for basic research". He also notes that there are several other programs supporting industrial R&D fellowships and scholarships including the Networks of Centres of Excellence, adding complexity to making Mitacs as the sole delivery agent.

"We already punch above our weight on basic research but not on the commercialization side. Still, we need to keep the parts that are working well," says Gupta. "We want to talk to tri-council and make sure nothing gets broken in the system. We need to understand the motivation for the Budget language."

R$