Canada’s $950M innovation bet is about to take its next step
TORONTO Ottawa’s superclusters program is beginning to heat up.
Money is expected to start flowing this fall once the five innovation partnerships receive final sign-off from the federal government — something that could happen imminently.
“I think we’re within weeks of getting this done,” said Frank Hart, board chair and interim CEO of the Prairie-based Protein Industries Supercluster.
In February, the federal government announced that it had selected five proposals to create innovation hubs across the country, each with a distinct focus on a key economic sector. Each so-called supercluster is a partnership between universities, large companies, and small and medium sized enterprises.
These partnership entities will receive a share of the $950 million that Ottawa has put up for the program, and they’ll use the money to leverage private-sector dollars for research and development projects.
The big idea is to jump start research commercialization. The oft-repeated conventional wisdom is that Canada lags global competition on innovation, even though Canadian universities do plenty of cutting-edge research.
But aside from Innovation Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains promoting the program throughout the winter and spring, not much has been publicly announced since the five superclusters were selected, and no money has flowed.
Behind the scenes, officials with the five hubs have been hammering out governance models and funding agreements with Ottawa.
“You know, I believe all of the five have final Treasury Board submissions or very close,” Hart said.
“From the federal government point of view, and our point of view, it took longer than we thought or hoped, but it is what it is.”
Hart said that once the money starts flowing, the idea is that partner companies will chip in funds and work with universities to collectively tackle an industry problem.
As an example, he said that after the oil is extracted from canola, what’s left is a byproduct that’s high in protein, but difficult to digest. So these days, it’s fed to cows to boost milk production, but if companies can figure out how to make it useful for human consumption, it could be a lot more valuable.
Partner companies that participate in the research would reap the benefits.
“For us, success means getting these competitors to work together for the greater good of the country,” he said.
The question of how patents and other intellectual property are handled remains an open-ended question for Sue Paish, CEO of the British Columbia Digital Technology Supercluster. Paish said some of the nuts-and-bolts planning work in B.C. has already been done and received approval from the federal Treasury Board.
Paish said that she expects to take initial pilot project research proposals to the supercluster board in late September, and they expect to approve an intellectual property plan around the same time, with projects launching in October.
Irene Sterian, chief technology officer for the Ontario Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster, also suggested that since February, it’s been a slow process to work out all the details.
“I think it was easier to launch the contest than it is now to operationalize,” she said.
Sterian has some experience with the commercialization problem, as an executive at Celestica and president and CEO of ReMAP, an organization devoted to technology.
For the Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster, Sterian said one of the significant efforts will be to simply develop an “asset map” to get an idea of who can contribute to manufacturing supply chains.
“Say you’re making something, even basic like leather wallets, and you want to get a supplier that makes cut and dyed (leather) there might be one in Etobicoke but you don’t know,” she said.
When it comes to something more complicated than a wallet, the problem is only magnified. She also talked about the importance of the “cluster” part of the superclusters; a major challenge for Canadian innovation is the expansive geography of the country.
“I know lots of great ideas and people in Saskatoon, but physically, to work with them in Toronto is limiting,” she said. One of the major hopes for all five of the superclusters is that they become a magnet for other companies who want to compete in the same sector, creating a wealth of skilled labour and synergies — something like Silicon Valley.
Sterian pointed to 7D Surgical, a company that’s partnered with ReMAP and worked with Celestica, as an example of “good commercialization,” but the company’s story demonstrates some of the challenges too.
From their offices in Toronto, 7D Surgical is building some remarkable medical devices — surgical lights with built-in cameras that collect images of spinal and brain surgery.
Using artificial intelligence and CT scan modelling, the 7D Surgical kit generates a real-time display of the bone structures in the patient, allowing surgeons to precisely guide their work — say, drilling a screw into a vertebra to reinforce a damaged spine.
7D Surgical is held up as an example of research commercialization done right, but the company story isn’t easily replicable.
The four founders were PhD students when they met, and CEO Beau Standish walked away from a promising academic career to start the company. One of the co-founders is a Canada Research Chair.
None of the founders were experts in their specific technology before they started, but that never would have happened if they hadn’t been academics, well-versed in the process of tugging useful insights out of published research in academic journals.
“We knew nothing about image guidance technology, tracking, about machine vision or machine learning, either. So it was learned on demand, and we did have to leverage existing academic publications to become experts in those fields,” Standish said.
“Quite frankly, it’s impossible if you’re not trained in the art.”