Good morning. Thank you for the invitation.
My name is Pascal Monette. I am the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Association pour le développement de la recherche et de l'innovation du Québec or ADRIQ. In fact, “Association de la recherche industrielle du Québec” is not the right name. Forty years ago it was known as the Association des directeurs de recherche industrielle du Québec, but it evolved.
I am here with Albert De Luca, who is the president of the board of directors.
I am pleased to be here.
I will say a few words about ADRIQ.
The association has existed for 40 years. Its goal is to advance research and innovation for the benefit of enterprises and also to improve competitiveness. In short, as I often say, we sow the seeds of innovation. We know that the innovation vector is a very important aspect in the development of our enterprises, particularly in the context of global competition.
Our employees and our board of directors are very representative of the research and innovation ecosystem. We have representatives from academia, colleges, research centres, small and large businesses, manufacturing and IT. As you can see, we are very representative.
We act on two fronts. First, we try to have a positive influence on research and innovation policies. With the Government of Quebec, in fact, we participated at a great deal in the development of the recent Quebec strategy on research and innovation, which was released last May. We also provide services to businesses to help them to be more innovative. Over the past years, we met with close to 2,000 businesses and spent several thousands of hours in discussions with them to help them become more innovative.
In the course of our work with the Government of Quebec, we published a brief which we will provide to the committee. It was entitled “Quatrième révolution industrielle: l'urgence de collaborer pour innover”. The title of the brief already gives you some indication of the themes we wish to discuss.
The brief contains 20 recommendations. I will review the four pillars that form the basis of those recommendations, and then I will give the floor to Mr. De Luca for his presentation on the Industry 4.0 concept.
The first of the four themes broached in the brief is the commercialization of innovation. We know that Canada and Quebec are hotbeds of university research, but given the investments that are made, we feel that the research outcomes that can be commercialized are not yet significant enough.
The second theme is the necessary collaboration between those who do research and the enterprises. Some good things are already being done, but we need to see more. At our annual gala, we highlight the best partnership projects, but there should be more of them.
The third theme is the culture of innovation and the development of scientific careers. I am more familiar with the situation in Quebec. In our province, there is a debate on the scarcity of labour, particularly in the information technologies. Businesses practically fight to figure out who should get tax credits. The problem persists; there has to be some pipeline to encourage young people to choose scientific and technological careers.
For instance, in Industry 4.0, the manufacture of the future provides jobs in highly computerized, clean, stimulating environments. We are no longer in greasy, noisy, soul-destroying plants; we have evolved.
So that is the fourth theme. The Government of Quebec gave us a mandate to develop a network of 4.0 centres of expertise in order to help Quebec manufacturing businesses get to the 4.0 transformation, because they have gotten behind considerably.
I will stop here.
Mr. De Luca, I yield the floor to you.