The Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program hopes to convince the federal government to more than double its annual budget allocation when it comes up for review in 2007. The program — which currently receives permanent funding of $77.4 million a year and supports 19 Networks — is fully committed and won’t be able to hold another full competition until 2008. That is fuelling speculation that the program will not be funding any new networks and is in effect being cancelled.

NCE program director Jean-Claude Gavrel says speculation about the program’s cancellation is “absolutely not true” and adds that the upcoming Treasury Board review in 2007 provides an excellent opportunity to ramp up the program, introduce new elements and significantly increase the base. He points to the Australian government’s Cooperative Research Centre, a far larger research networking initiative which was launched at about the same time as the NCE program.

“This program has always been a leader but funding wise it hasn’t kept up. The Australian program is now up to $190 million a year. That’s the kind of target we should set for ourselves,” he says. “(Treasury Board review) is a great opportunity to grow the program and get more money. The Australian levels of funding are appropriate, There are a lot of similarities between the two programs,” he says.

The Treasury Board review will find the NCE far different from the last time it conducted a thorough examination of its terms and conditions, impact and performance measures. There’s been an increased emphasis on commercial outcomes and the NCE program has come a long way since its inception in 1989.

In the past year alone, two new elements have been added to the NCE program – a pilot program to support networking initiatives for areas of research not currently being supported by the NCE, and a targeted program requested by the government in Budget 2004 (R$, April 6/04).

NEW PILOT PROGRAM

The pilot program - NCE New Initiatives (NCE-NI) – offers support for researchers engaged in strategic areas of leading-edge research and has a modest budget of $1 million annually. The funding is being drawn from internal NCE resources and is meant to provide networking-only activities. Researchers are expected to secure research funding from other sources such as the granting councils, using the NCE-NI funding to build up networking and partnership capacity before considering a proposal for full NCE funding.

“It’s meant to support great ideas, opportunities and potential impacts for research networking that may not be mature enough to go to the full NCE program,” says Gavrel. “The pilot’s objective is to look at network-only support. There are a lot more programs for researchers to tap into but the issue of networking is not a big one. The granting councils have some funding in this area, but not much.”

TARGETED NCE

The second new area for the NCE program is the Network targetting research into bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) – commonly known as Mad Cow Disease – and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). The federal government is providing $5 million a year in permanent new funding to establish an NCE of the best researchers in this area. A group has now assembled and is preparing a full proposal for a September 6 deadline.

Tentatively called Prion Net, the group behind the proposed NCE is led by Dr Neil Cashman – formerly a principal investigator at Univ of Toronto’s Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases and now a Canada Research Chair holder at the Univ of British Columbia.

“This is a new approach for us. There’s no structural difference from the other NCEs. The difference is during the proposal process. We’re asking them to develop more of their governance and management. That way, it will be ready to go immediately once it passes through committee,” says Gavrel. “The evaluation is done on a more strategic level. We set up an expert panel and it went into greater detail.”

Both NCE-NI and the Prion Net stem from an earlier attempt to expand the NCE program. Dubbed NCE II, the initiative was ultimately unsuccessful but Gavrel says the process yielded several valuable outputs.

“The exercise was extremely useful in identifying a number of areas we could go into. The timing was not right but NCE-NI came out of it and so did the idea of NCE as a strategic tool for government. In 2004 the government announced the BSE network,” he says. “We may see many of the elements of the NCE-II proposal in the proposal and it may grow significantly but we need to demonstrate the impacts.”

FULLY COMMITTED

In the meantime, the NCE program can do little to expand the scope of its activities. After several years of back-to-back competitions, its funding has been fully committed for the next few years. During the last full competition, just one Network was selected from 30 proposals, and rumours have been spreading throughout the community that the government won’t be extending the program beyond its commitments to existing NCEs.

“I’ve heard a lot of disappointment when we tell them (researchers) that the next competition is 2008 for a 2009 launch. This may have caused the belief that it was sunsetting. Absolutely not,” says Gavrel. “We’re committed to a 2007 revamp of the program. We’re paying a lot of attention to what the program is achieving and pushing the NCE to show those impacts.”

Gavrel says there is much to be proud of in the NCE program, despite the modest level of funding.

“The NCEs are moving toward doing more in terms of technology transfer and knowledge translation. Granting council initiatives in this area are still behind us. We still lead in networking. NCEs have changed the culture in the research community.”

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