The National Research Council (NRC) has launched more than 200 collaborative R&D projects valued at $93 million, enabling groups of its researchers to develop disruptive technologies alongside researchers from industry, academia and not-for-profits in areas deemed key to the government’s innovation and economic development agenda.

Core funding of $44.5 million is contained within the $258 million in additional resources awarded to the NRC in the 2018 Budget, including $36 million for its flagship Challenge Program, augmented by $18.5 million in internal funding and a further $30 million in related project costs. Also pooled in the total is $796,000 for collaborative programs allocated to NRC’s pandemic response Challenge Program.

The bulk of the funding goes to projects launched by five flagship collaborative initiatives anchoring the Challenge Program: Materials for Clean Fuel Challenge program, Disruptive Technology Solutions for Cell and Gene Therapy Challenge Program, High-Throughput and Secure Networks Program, Artificial Intelligence for Design Challenge Program and a Pandemic Response Challenge Program.

“Relating to that — and this is new funding we’ve got since 2018 — we’ve also got about $15 million to invest in a pandemic response challenge program in 2020. It’s exactly the same structure and logic whereby we bring to bear the capacity we have in NRC and match it up with expertise in academia and the private sector, says acting NRC president Dr. Roger Scott-Douglas.

He adds that four more Challenge Programs will be added in early 2021 in the following areas: Internet of Things: Quantum Sensors, hosted by the Security and Disruptive Technologies Research Centre; Aging in Place, examining preventive home and community-based care; and, the Arctic and Northern Challenge, which succeeds the sunsetting Arctic program.

The second area of investment sees $9 million go towards challenge programs supporting the government’s overall innovation strategy through collaborative work with each of the five superclusters comprising ISED’s $950-million Innovation Superclusters Initiative.

“We pair up our researchers with, for instance, those that are being funded: NGen, Protein Industry supercluster, ocean supercluster, what have you,” says Scott-Douglas.

The third component of the Challenge Program — the Ideation Fund — is receiving an injection of $2.5 million on top of the $6 million in allocations to its two tranches. The New Beginnings Initiative provides NRC researchers $25,000 for one-year projects to develop potentially disruptive technologies. External collaborators also receive $25,000. The Small Teams Initiative provides small groups of NRC researchers with $333,000 (and an equivalent amount for external collaborators) to undertake projects of up to three years. Projects in both tranches are subject to peer review.

“We need to regenerate our ideas bank. We’ve got within the NRC, largely driven by researchers against our theme of driving research excellence through a reimagined NRC …, these kinds of very exploratory, highly innovative projects to recharge our pool of work, our bank of IP,” says Scott-Douglas.  “We hope they will be grist for future challenge programs and build up, working with collaborators, a real capacity.”

DARPA inspired

The NRC Challenge Program was inspired by similar programs launched by the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as the Innovation Solutions Canada program run by the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED). However, the Challenge Program has a unique twist, according to Chris Johnstone, NRC’s Director General, National Programs and Business Services Branch.

“We’re not aware of a model quite like what we’re doing with respect to bringing the federal researchers more closely together with the external collaborators to solve those challenges. That’s where I would say this initiative is breaking new ground,” says Johnstone, echoing former NRC President Iain Stewart’s contention that the new collaborative approach comprises a “paradigm-busting model within the NRC”.

Johnstone adds that the funding envelope of the Challenge Program includes a portion dedicated to international collaboration, which in turn will generate additional financing. Also permissible are funds from other national R&D programs, such as the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

The re-imagining is the second major re-think of the NRC since 2010, the first being a major industry-centric transformation under former president John McDougall. This time, elements of the McDougall transformation have been combined with a re-affirmation of long-term research, collaboration and distributed decision-making allowing researchers enhanced input into research programs, partnerships and resource allocation.

The benefits are enormous according to Kelley Parato, Program Director of the NRC’s Disruptive Technology Solutions for Cell and Gene Therapy Challenge program. Building on a rich ecosystem across the country that has built capacity through previous funding mechanisms like the Networks of Centres of Excellence, Parato says collaboration is instrumental in solving important pathological, infrastructure and capacity challenges in the field. To that end, her group consulted widely across Canada to sharpen its vision for the future and identify expertise that could contribute to new disruptive technology solutions.

“With these sequential envisioning exercises with the broader community, we started to identify certain important groups all the way down to important individual investigators that have really important and disruptive gene-changing technologies that really pair nicely with some of NRC’s internal capacities that we were putting forward,” says Parato.

For the Materials for Clean Fuel Challenge Program, the funding facilitated a deep dive into Canada’s pool of relevant SMEs as well as an international scan of companies that could enhance the objectives of their projects which were selected with guidance from ISED.

“We first scoped out the challenge and then we did an open call which was sent down to SMEs in Canada. At the same time, we also did our homework to find the biggest change-makers and impacts in Canada, Germany, Japan and the UK,” says Program Director Phil De Luna. “We reached out to the ones we felt had the most to offer and were synergistic with the NRC, then went through rigorous peer review (with) an advisory committee made up of senior director-level people and above from oil and gas, Suncor, Natural Resources Canada, the list goes on.”

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