Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the invitation.
The paper we submitted was subtitled “Commercialization of the Results for the Benefit of Canada”. In other words, rather than taking on science and technology broadly written, we wanted to talk about the commercialization process. I'll concentrate my remarks on the commercialization aspects today.
Precarn Incorporated is a not-for-profit national company that supports collaborative research and development in advanced technologies. The unique aspect of our model is that we insist that every one of our research projects include the end user; that is, the organization, company, hospital that has a need that can be filled with a technological solution.
Another name we use for that end user is first customer; therefore, we are very proud of the fact that our whole research and development philosophy builds commercialization right into the process of the research and technology development.
The basic premise of the issue facing Canada is well understood, and it's been discussed for a number of years. We are among the world leaders in supporting publicly-funded research at our universities and research hospitals and so on, but at the same time we lag—behind other OECD countries, principally—in the commercialization of the products that result from that research. Another way it's expressed often is that our industrial sectors do not contribute as much to research and development in this country.
My submission is that one of the reasons for this is that we as a country do not give enough support nor provide enough incentive to what I'm referring to as the middle. In the paper, I refer to the fact that there is the “stuff” we're talking about, and that has three different aspects; the stuff is science, technology, and product. Those are the three results, if you will, the three creatures we're trying to achieve.
Underneath that, there are three processes, and the processes are research, which often or most commonly relates to science; development, which relates to technology; and commercialization, which relates to a product.
Underneath that, broadly speaking, and I'm obviously over-simplifying, there are organizations or processes that facilitate those things. Universities and research hospitals do research that creates scientific knowledge. At the other end, private companies—commercial enterprises—do commercialization that sells products around the world.
In the middle there are organizations like Precarn that support the technological development that bridges the gap between scientific research and the commercialization of products.
The government has taken a number of steps to promote the bridging of that gap and to promote the application of science and technology. The science and technology strategy, entitled “Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada's Advantage”, included programs such as the CECR program that Jean-Claude just referred to, the business-led networks of centres of excellence, which are attempts to recognize that the issue is that we do really well at science and scientific research but are not so good as a country at commercialization of products.
The paper itself recognizes that gap. It talks about there being a place in the middle of the continuum where there are both public good benefits and private benefits to be achieved. The paper says that at that point in the spectrum, government and private sector should collaborate, as long as the private sector is willing to put in money to try to bridge the gap. That's the issue.
For example, the United States has a small business innovation research program that is a competitive process, much like the process we operate. It's money taken out of R and D departments in the United States government—eleven of them, I believe—and it's supposed to be designed specifically to promote technological innovation in small companies. In their own description of the program, they say SBIR funds the critical start-up and development stages, and it encourages the commercialization of technology products or services, which in turn stimulates the economy.
But they make a specific point in that document to say that they do not fund the commercialization activity; that is for the private sector. What they're funding is the space in the middle between the scientific breakthrough and the technology development.
As I say, government has made progress in all of these areas. We would submit that there is still room in the middle for the government to support, on a competitive basis, technology development.
Thank you.