Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am the associate scientific director of AFM Net, which is a national network of centres of excellence. The headquarters are here in Guelph. I happen to be a university professor and researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax. I'm also the director of the Canadian Institute of Fisheries Technology, which is a non-profit R and D facility supporting local industry in the Maritimes. I was also at one time a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. That's a bit of my background.
What I want to talk about is basically the disconnect, or the two solitudes, between the research challenges faced by industry and the research challenges faced by universities and government. Then I'll talk about how we can bring these areas together to optimize our resources.
From the industry side, the research needs are usually very applied. They're short term and pragmatic—they need an answer now.
Take the food industry. It is typically low margin, high volume. This means that if you're a small or medium-sized enterprise you have limited funds for research. But even large companies have downsized or outsourced their R and D. So there isn't a lot of money in industry for research.
Also the ownership of intellectual property has to be clear. They don't necessarily have to own the IP, but they have to know who does own it.
Finally, confidentiality is essential. First off the mark usually wins.
I'll speak for university researchers, but this applies almost equally to government researchers. University researchers have conflicted demands. They have research versus teaching, pure discovery versus applied research. When you're an industry researcher, you have one focus. You're focusing on research for that company. When you're a university researcher, you have a lot of different hats that you're wearing.
For career advancement, the traditional emphasis is on discovery research rather than applied research. Collaborative research is not as highly valued when you come up for tenure or promotion. University research tends to have a longer timeline. You're expected to have research programs rather than projects per se, projects within programs but still long-term programs. Most of the research is done by graduate students and post-docs, so there's a training element involved. It's difficult to tell a grad student to work on a project and present an answer in a month.
The other thing is that the focus is on publications, not patents. For tenure and promotion, they'll count the publications, but patents don't get the same value, which I think is completely backward. Grad student theses also take time to publish, so it's this whole publish or perish model for profs.
Finally, the IP can be problematic—it's extremely important in industry. Many, if not most, researchers aren't really that interested in IP. A lot of them wouldn't know IP if they were to stumble over it. The value of the IP isn't recognized. The protection of IP is extremely spotty. Most labs do not have rigorous protocols for making sure that everything is documented in lab books. Also, different universities have different policies. A company dealing with universities is not always going to have the same playing field.
Overlaying all this are other challenges. Canada is a vast country. We have a small population. We have scattered expertise and resources. Our research culture is not geared to collaborative, transformative research. The food industry is fragmented nationally, but so is the research community. We have a lot of really good research going on, but it is scattered and not linked.
The upshot of this is that both sides are frustrated. What this means is that there's a loss of opportunities. Canada is great at fundamental research but very poor at application and commercialization of research.
Getting down to the opportunity, so far we haven't done a great job of linking the industry and the different research capabilities. At the Advanced Foods and Materials Network, a nationwide research organization put together to link academia with industry, government, non-government organizations, and international organizations, the infrastructure has been developed. We have a wealth of experience at putting together research teams that are aimed at transformative research and commercialization of research, as well as training highly qualified personnel who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow.
The funding for this network is going to cease as of March 31 of this year. Having this infrastructure in place, having the expertise and experience in place, is an opportunity to take this and overlay it as a research manager for the disparate sections across Canada in both industry and academia. It's a central portal to put together industry and researchers, NGOs, etc.
I'll stop there and answer any questions.
