Cabinet Memorandum will incorporate employee ideas into NRC’s innovation action plan

The rank and file at the National Research Council will have their voices heard at the federal Cabinet table this spring following an internal consultation that identified ways in which the agency can best support Canada’s innovation priorities.

The NRC sent seven “tiger teams” across the country last fall to ask employees their views on the current state of the NRC, including its capabilities, infrastructure, and massive organizational changes that have occurred over the past six years.

The top priorities identified are: sustaining research excellence, more time for blue sky thinking, doing more to help firms grow to scale, and expand the pipeline for young talent.

The tiger teams were unleashed in response to NRC president Iain Stewart’s mandate letter to explore ways in which the agency can support the government’s unfolding Innovation Agenda (recently retitled the Innovation and Skills Plan), leading to an internal discussion paper that will inform a Memorandum to Cabinet for the 2018 Budget. Dubbed NRC Dialogue, the stocktaking and assessment aims to clarify the role that NRC’s myriad assets can play to support business and the national research and innovation ecosystems, while identifying changes that can be made to improve both performance and impact.

“There was a sense of recognition, support and embracing of a range of changes that have occurred through the NRC transformation over the past few years,” says NRC president Iain Stewart. “I think generally people really like them – the idea of doing large-scale collaborative, multi-disciplinary, outcome-oriented programs. For the most part, it’s become culturally part of what we do. We are on track to bring forward a Cabinet proposal for the spring.”

At the same time, Stewart acknowledges that the recent transformation has been a turbulent one, with a greater emphasis on revenues and shifting the traditional institute-based structure to one of portfolios and programs. Staff complained that this approach took precedence over basic research, refreshing talent and the NRC’s place within the national innovation ecosystem.

The results of that largely top-down decision making, while pleasing to many within the organization, also alienated NRC personnel engaged in research at the frontiers or in areas where industry revenue generation is unlikely. As reported in RESEARCH MONEY last fall, the result was a polarized agency with internal groups forming to protest the perceived abandonment of regional clusters and the diminution of support for higher risk, longer-term research. The NRC Dialogue is intended in part to address those concerns while identifying changes that can bring coherence and improvements to NRC activities.

“Betterment is the key word it seems to me when I think about the NRC Dialogue. How do we better the context for our staff, how do we create the time for our staff to invest in their personal excellence, excellence in our organization, foundational technologies of tomorrow. These are all things we are working with and continuing to shape and evolve in order to better what we are. It’s not a money issue,” says Stewart.

“I’m starting with an organization that was profoundly reorganized … You have a transformation with a capital T, you have turbulence from external factors and you need to continue to sustain a level of revenue generation to fund the organization’s salaries ... What the NRC Dialogue is meant to do is to allow the NRC to talk to itself about what worked well, what hasn’t worked as well as we would like and therefore what would we like to do to better operations of our organization and achieve its objectives in support of the Innovation Agenda.”

Young Talent

Since arriving at the NRC last year, Stewart has championed the need for more young researchers to work at the NRC’s world-class facilities, and on multi-disciplinary teams of researchers and technicians. The goal is to see some of those newer workers refreshing the NRC’s talent pool.

The cross-country consultation reinforced the concept, leading to a pilot program for postdoctoral fellowships that is now being launched with applications due by April 23. The NRC web site lists 21 projects ranging from advanced solid state lighting materials and devices to vision, cognition and mood effects of exposure to near-infrared radiation, with successful applicants being offered terms of up to two years.

“We got over 100 ideas about where post docs could add real value and what would be the interesting projects they would work on. We picked 21,” says Stewart. “I still have the ambition to grow that substantially, but for now we’re just testing the idea of the new approach to how we recruit post docs and attract them to come to the NRC. It’s absolutely on my radar.”

While the intelligence gathered through the NRC Dialogue informs a Cabinet memorandum, the recent federal Budget awarded $59.9 million in 2017-18 to position the NRC within the innovation and skills plan. Rather than new money, Stewart says the Budget renewed long-standing B-based funding in support on the agency’s former cluster strategy, launched in 2003 in support of then prime minister Paul Martin’s New Deal for Canadian cities.

“(Cluster funding has) been renewed multiple times and it has in effect become just part of our budget … it got repurposed into supporting business innovation so it’s part of the funding of the NRC,” says Stewart. “This is the B-base funding being extended by the new government which I think is wonderful, a very positive indication that they want to sustain the level of activity that we have.”

In addition, the Budget awarded three other funding envelopes in support of other departments or agencies:

• $6 million to develop, in collaboration with Indigenous stakeholders, information technology to preserve oral histories by converting speech to text, and creating other interactive educational materials;
• $8 million over four years (as part of a $201 million award) for the NRC to continue to take action to address air pollution and undertake activities such as indoor air pollution mitigation; and,
• $20 million for the Industrial Research Assistance Program to continue with its Youth Employment – Green Jobs initiative.

Stewart emphasizes that the Dialogue is primarily about making the NRC an improved organization better aligned with government innovation priorities and not an exercise designed to justify increased funding.

Ideas stemming from the NRC Dialogue “that we can do with our own resources and authorities we’re just going to do it. We can start managing those issues and responding to them now - May, June, July, over the summer,” says Stewart. “For anything that requires new authority or additional funding, it’s important not to design a process that’s hung up on that. If that money happens, that’s great. We’ll do additional value for the government.”

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