Novel business models define winners in latest Business-Led NCE competition

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Electronics manufacturing, new technologies for ultra deep mining, biomarkers for personalized clinical trials and environmental technologies for the aerospace sector shared $49.7 million over five years in the second competition of the Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence (BL-NCE) program. The new networks, which bring the BL-NCE program up to full capacity, aim to demonstrate how direct support for collaborative research and innovation can stimulate commercialization and productivity growth.

Each of the new networks — which includes a retooled aerospace BL-NCE that was unsuccessful in last year's competition for extended funding — were successful in convincing the gauntlet of review committees and panels (see chart page 2) that their unique business plans and governance models offered the path to market success.

The program — highly touted for putting business and academia on an equal footing and including end users and smaller companies in its networks — was made permanent in 2012 with an annual budget of $12 million. The latest competition saw 120 initial applications, which were whittled down to 54 letters of intent and further reduced to seven full proposals before the final selection was made.

The new BL-NCEs received between $7.7 million and $15 million, depending on the amount of private sector cash and in-kind funding they were able to attract prior to the deadline for full proposals. The Ultra Deep Mining Network successfully racked up $31 million in commitments. Others continue to bring on additional private sector partners as they establish their networks and solicit new collaboration.

Despite the relatively modest funding involved, the four new networks have been able to secure the participation of a wide range of corporate and not-for-profit players ranging from large multinationals to a host of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and not-for-profit entities.

ReMAP

For the Refined Manufacturing Acceleration Process (ReMAP) network, BL-NCE funding affords participants the opportunity to create value in Canada by adding new capabilities and capacity to their manufacturing offerings. Proposed by Celestica — a Toronto-based multinational specializing in various aspects of electronics manufacturing — ReMAP will leverage 38 laboratories and manufacturing lines across Canada via 15 projects in optics/photonics, materials and renewable energy. Typical projects will involve the development of new solders, smaller and cheaper optical devices and higher efficiency solar cells, to name a few.

Participating companies come from the aerospace, industrial, defence and semiconductor equipment sectors and engage in projects with technology readiness levels (TRL) between 4 and 8. (Projects funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council typically focus on TRL 1 to 4.) For SMEs, it's an opportunity to work with large firms to validate technology and link to global markets.

"Celestica has a global footprint and many of our customers are first buyers. SMEs can fit into this. We can put process in the network and can build and distribute," says Irene Sterian, ReMAP's network director and Celestica's director of innovation and product enablement. "We need to maintain electronics manufacturing in Canada to stay competitive. We're losing our capability to manufacture and re-invent by combining design with manufacturing."

Celestica has been working with San Jose CA-based start-ups and Sterian says she's impressed with their "exponential speed of bringing products to market" — a speed she says Canada needs to replicate.

Sterian says the projects supported by the NSERC-funded Photovoltaic Innovation Network are a good example of promising projects that can be taken further.

"Through ReMAP, I can help to create a supply chain by bringing together academics, companies and customers," she says. "There's an opportunity to create value by adding new things to manufacturing offerings such as new materials, and products that need electronics such as health care senors."

As a newcomer to the NCE environment, ReMAP has contracted the Canadian Digital Media Network (CDMN) to assist in setting up the network and develop an operations plan. Sterian says CDMN's focus on the software side of information and communications technology complements ReMAP's hardware focus, providing a potential source of further leverage.

UDMN

A very different set of challenges face the Ultra Deep Mining Network (UDMN), which was proposed by the Centre for Excellence in Mining Engineering (CEMI). UDMN will focus on technological solutions to enable greater and more efficient extraction of metals — primarily gold, nickel and copper — from mines deeper than 2.5 km. The technologies can potentially be applied to fracking in the oil and gas sector.

"There are geotechnical stability issues with deep mining and heat increases the further you go down ... Big companies don't have the time or money honing down processes in detail so they're developing closer relationships with SMEs which will implement the results we produce. We sit between the users, the big companies and the SMEs," says UDMN president and CEO Doug Morrison.

UDMN has $46 million, including $31 million from industry ($17 million in cash and $14 million in-kind — half of which is being provided by SMEs). Projects will be undertaken in the areas of technical service delivery and equipment. Four committees have been struck to guide the not-for-profit organization (theme leaders, geotechnical, heat and productivity), overseen by a group of company executives, a monitoring board and the CEMI board of directors.

The bulk of projects involve the modernizing and modification of existing technology, with priority given to the most pressing technological needs of business.

"Research is being done in some areas but we're mostly about innovation," says Morrison. "We will conduct pilots and demonstrations and scale up at a mining site, developing prototypes and trying them out."

Pre Thera

As the only life sciences network to be approved, Precision Therapeutics (Pre Thera Research) aims to bring personalized medicine to the treatment of cancer. Proposed by the Quebec Clinical Research Organization in Cancer (Q-CROC), PreThera will develop targeted therapies for cancer treatment as opposed to chemotherapy. By utilizing biomarkers for a wide range of cancer tumours, it will undertake personalized clinical trials that are of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry.

"We want to create more effective drug development and bring drugs to patients faster by increasing the supporting research," says Dr Thérèse Gagnon-Kugler, a specialist in molecular and cellular biology and PreThera's executive director. "We'll set up a network of hospitals to do the work and build a database to draw on for clinical trials and pharma can come to us for access to the database."

PreThera is establishing a board of directors largely comprised of venture capitalists, big pharma and SMEs as well as an all-pharma committee to direct the network on the private sector's needs for drug development.

The network will also work in conjunction with the Personalized Medicine Partnership for Cancer (PMPC), a not-for-profit organization aiming to position Quebec as a global leader in development and deployment of personalized medicine solutions to cancer patients.

"We can drastically change the landscape of clinical trials and the delivery of health care," says Gagnon-Kugler. "Q-CROC has an academic Quebec City focus while PreThera has a Canadian focus. Our business plan calls for us to start in Quebec and expand across Canada."

For the legal and ethical aspects of its activities, PreThera is linked to the McGill Univ-based Centre for Genomics and Policy, a highly regarded research unit headed by Dr Bartha Knoppers.

GARDN

The success of the Green Aviation Research and Development Network (GARDN) in the competition is something of an anomaly. An existing network, it was unsuccessful in a competition last year for extended funding (R$, February 21/13) but took advantage of the fact that it was eligible to apply again in the latest competition. Its revamped proposal scaled back the amount of funding it was seeking from $25 million to $12 million — the former request reflective of the strong industry support it garnered over its first five years of operation. During that time, it launched 17 projects and developed 30 technologies, 10 of which are close to commercialization.

"The amount of funding originally requested may be the reason (the proposal was rejected) but we had $50 million in industrial commitments," says GARDN?executive director Sylvain Cofsky. "NCE funding is limited so we had to scale back but still we were surprised. Right now we have $12 million in commitments but that will grow."

Cofsky says the network also heeded NCE feedback noting the small number of participating SMEs, as well as the number of research programs it was proposing.

"We scaled back the research programs from seven to three that fall under clean air transport systems. There's now more coherence between research projects," he says. "We have more SMEs but the innovation process in aerospace is led by the big players. Still, two or three of our 12 research projects are led by SMEs which is new for us."

GARDN is tightly focused on technologies that reduce noise and emissions from aircraft — a niche that includes re-designed systems and parts, materials, manufacturing processes and fuel types.

Its work dovetails with that of the Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Quebec (CRIAQ) which focuses on earlier-stage technology development in the TRL 1-4 range. GARDN?works in the TRL 3-7 range and if CRIAQ succeeds in expanding to the rest of Canada, Cofsky says GARDN could become the green aviation component of that program.

"GARDN has a national mandate and focuses on clusters in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg," says Cofsky.

Other partners include Sustainable Development Technology Canada, Future Major Platforms, International Civil Aviation Organization and the European Union (CleanSky).

GARDN's board of directors will be expanded from 17 to 21 to include more SMEs and economic and marketing expertise. A new assessment integration committee will also be established to provide a holistic perspective to its projects and direction.

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