Where you need to go in Ottawa for a good idea

Which is why MITACS, despite its wonky name, deserves to be more broadly known. When hundreds of mathematicians a year start spending time in the real world of business, the gulf between industry and academia starts to narrow. Businesses start to realize that research and development doesn’t have to be done by some other business. Young people who’ve trained since their teenage years for a life on campus—but who, statistically, are unlikely to land tenure—start to see real-world outlets for their abilities.

More broadly, Gupta has turned his organization into perhaps Canada’s leading source of practical ideas for improving the knowledge economy. “What we believe at MITACS is that building a knowledge economy is really a people issue. Knowledge is something that resides in people’s heads. It’s really an issue of skilled workers.”

How does Canada produce more skilled workers? “If you think about producing anything, there’s a supply chain, right? If you want to produce a widget, you start with raw materials, you process it and you market it. “If you want to produce knowledge workers, you have to start with raw material, which is smart young people, basically. You have to process them—teach them the kind of skills they need. And you have to market them, deploy them out into society.”

MITACS now runs programs at every step of that chain. Last year it launched Globalink, designed to get the best raw material. It’s a concerted effort to recruit the highest-ranking graduates from India’s top technical schools. These undergrads could write their own ticket to the world’s best universities. They would not normally consider coming to Canada. But a combination of personal attention and challenging academics persuaded 17 of them to spend three months at British Columbia universities in 2009. This summer the number was up to 105. Next year it will be 300. Gupta is fond of geometrical progressions.

If Globalink is about attracting human capital and Accelerate is about helping science students realize there’s a place for them in industry, a new program called Elevate aims to ensure that the brightest minds stay in Canada as they begin their careers. Funded this summer with $9.95 million from Science Minister Gary Goodyear, Elevate connects 80 post-doctoral fellows with private-sector companies for two-year collaborations. “These people are now facing career choices,” Gupta said. “We want to make sure we give them industry as a really interesting, viable choice.”

In a highly competitive global knowledge market, it matters a lot whether efforts like Gupta’s succeed. Twenty of 27 graduate students he’s supervised as a Simon Fraser prof have left for the United States. It cost Canadian taxpayers a mint to educate them, and the wealth they might have generated if they’d stayed here is greater still. “The Silicon Valley phenomenon was not a phenomenon of California residents,” Gupta says. “It occurred because bright young people from around the world came to the graduate schools of California.” From a standing start, MITACS has become a formidable engine for ensuring that bright young people come to Canada, stay here, and find work that exploits their formidable potential.