Where you need to go in Ottawa for a good idea

Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.

My very strong hunch is that Canadian industry doesn’t need more help so much as it needs to be made to worry, through a set of policies designed to expose Canada more directly to global competition. So I like this quote from John Manley in David’s column: “Quite frankly, if there is an innovation problem in Canada, that’s the responsibility of the management and boards of directors here in Canada.” I’m really pleased to see that UofT president David Naylor is on Goodyear’s panel; he’s good at the kind of blunt talk that will be needed.

There’s another guy on the panel who will not be familiar to just about anybody, but should be. His name is Arvind Gupta, he runs an organization called MITACS, and I’ve had a story about him ready to run for the past couple of weeks in one of our upcoming university issues. We’ve plucked that story out of our queue so you can read about Gupta now.

Here it is:

Much of the debate over innovation and productivity in Canada focusses on ideas: the search for a new research breakthrough that changes the way we see the world. Governments’ R&D policy concentrates on steering dollars toward types of research that might produce the kind of discovery that can pay off in the marketplace.

But what if the most valuable product from higher education isn’t the ideas but the people who generate them—the superbly educated graduates with advanced math and science degrees?

That question fascinates Arvind Gupta, a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University. He is also CEO of MITACS, a federally funded Centre of Excellence in information technology.

MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) was one of more than a dozen Centres of Excellence set up by the Mulroney and Chrétien governments to encourage industry and academia to work closely together in specific areas. And it didn’t attract much attention outside computer-science circles until it launched a little internship program in 2003.

That year, 18 doctoral students in maths and science were placed for four-month internships at Canadian companies. The students’ mandate was to tackle a technical problem the company was facing. But science students are problem-solvers born and bred; as often as not, they found other ways to improve the work their host companies were doing. Both sides had to make a real investment: the company paid $7,500 for the extra help, and the students had to report back to their PhD advisors on the work they’d done.

The internship program, dubbed Accelerate, took off. From 18 internships in 2003 it grew to 608 in 2009 and doubled again to more than 1,200 this year. That growth is not artificial. It is demand-driven. As word spreads about how creative these young recruits could be, businesses lined up to get involved. “Our goal is to get this up to 10,000 projects a year,” Gupta says.