Industry Committee on May 7th, 2015

[Dr. Danial Wayner]

You know what? It would make all of our lives so much easier if there were an easy answer to that question.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I'm sure it's complex.

[Kevin Fitzgibbons]

I would say that you've really hit the core of the issue for Canada, nevertheless; and I think it's an issue that's been bedevilling not just this government but governments going back for several decades.

Also, as I'm sure this committee can appreciate, the nature of the Canadian economy has a lot to do with the level of research, development, and innovation. When we look at our exports and their trade, we do have a very strong resource-based economy that traditionally, in its own right, is not considered to be a performer of research and development. However, it is an adopter—in fact, a very sophisticated adopter—of information technologies, for example.

But I think, really, what you're getting at is something we consider to be an ongoing struggle, and that is connecting the two worlds closer together. Much of that can be done through the partnerships. At NSERC, for example, we have developed a number of programs that are not just pushing the technologies out to say that there's something really cool here that people in industry should be looking at, but having discussions with them about what their issues are, and exposing them to knowledge and connections where they could get the information and turn that into something much more effective.

But that comes in a whole ecosystem of other things. For example, people in the NRC's IRAP, the industrial research assistance program, will be working constantly with the small and medium-sized enterprises, in particular, to help them get to that point.

Our job at NSERC is on the funding side to ensure that, on the one hand, we have a very rich, diverse, and high-quality research base, and on the other, it is connected.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Yes, I would like you to answer this, Dr. Hewitt.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

Thank you.

I would just simply agree with much of what's been said. From the perspective of SSHRC and the social sciences and humanities, we tend to see the basic versus applied issue as more of a continuum. People do work that may be seen as very basic but then it leads to applications through others and the work of others. Some people do work that spans the entire spectrum.

We've designed our programs in such a way as to allow for individuals to seek funding at both ends of the spectrum and in between, whether that's through our insight grant program, more on the basic side, or through partnerships, more on the applied side.

One of the things I would add, though, just in terms of your question about innovation and impact, is that particularly in our disciplines it's very difficult sometimes to show what that impact is. In terms of work, for example, that may lead to policy change, that then becomes incorporated, and that then is taken advantage of within industry. It's quite often difficult to understand precisely what the pathways were. Personally, I would advocate for a bit more forensic investigation, in terms of working back.

I can give you a brief example of a disruptive technology that has a profoundly social science question attached to it, and that is that in the forestry industry it is now possible to build tall structures completely of wood. So you could build a 20-storey tower or a 40-storey tower, I think, completely out of wood. I'm not sure who'd want to live on the 39th floor, so it's a disruptive technology with no home.

Ontario has determined that now you can build a six-storey structure out of wood, so policy has changed, and that was as a result of research, undoubtedly. Perhaps on the safety side, that's reasonable. But the question is whether you would want to live on the 39th floor and what research would change Canadian attitudes about that, or not.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Dr. Hewitt.

I'm sorry. That's all the time you have.

I apologize to our witnesses. Certainly you should be addressed by your titles, and I'm sorry for any of those who have a doctorate that I did not recognize. I don't have it listed here, and I apologize for that. I always live by the axiom, “give honour where honour's due”.

Here is somebody who deserves honour, the honourable Mr. Regan. Please go ahead for eight minutes.

Maybe I should err on the side of caution and just say, “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, and Doctor”.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thanks very much for being here this morning.

Dr. Wayner...?

[Dr. Danial Wayner]

Yes. It is in fact.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

How about that. That's pretty safe.

When you're looking at a new technology, how do you assess it's potential to disrupt?

[Dr. Danial Wayner]

I need to go back to the challenge of recognizing that it's not a disruption, in my view anyway, until it's in the marketplace. I think it's okay to ask how do we understand the potential to either create a new market, or to displace technologies that are in an existing market. Normally the way most of the business assessments start is by asking if there is a market demand.

In the deck I presented there are a couple of diagrams. One of them.... Where we like to start is by asking: what are the market opportunities? If we understand market opportunities then we can ask what the technology gaps are that are preventing us from accessing those markets. If we understand the technology gaps then we can ask what the knowledge gaps are that are stopping us from inventing that technology. That's where the collaboration comes in.

One of the things I said in my remarks was that it is dangerous to try to pick the horse, but I think it's okay to pick the race.

When I say it's okay to pick the race, what I mean is that I'm reasonably sure there are going to be significant disruptions around the human-machine interface. I think artificial intelligence is one of those areas where Canada needs to build some good platform technologies because that's one of the places where we expect technologies to emerge that will be disruptive.

We can say the same for robotics and for additive manufacturing, with 3-D printing being one example.

When I look at the world, and if I look in the short term.... First you need to understand from the NRC perspective. We have work that is absolutely geared to support companies in the two- to five-year timeframe and sometimes even faster. We have work that is really in the midterm, although my particular division is trying to look a little more over the horizon. I learn from the markets that we currently understand, and that allows us to look forward and ask what the emerging market opportunities are.

That may be an indirect answer to your question. The disruptiveness of a technology has to do with our ability to think about how it's going to be used.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

On the continuum line from basic to applied research, is it possible to identify an area at the point at which you're likely to be able to do that?

It seems to me that sometimes with basic research, and with discoveries in basic research, when you're trying to identify market opportunities, initially that may be difficult and it may take time for it to become clear.

One discovery that occurs to me in its development—where that may not be the case so much, I don't know—was the digital sensor for cameras. It took quite a while after it was first discovered—I think it was at MIT—before they started making cameras out of that. There may have been other discoveries that led to it that were key, but at that time were not.

That's the question about—

[Dr. Danial Wayner]

I want to refer to some of the remarks from Dr. Hewitt because he said at the end of his comments that in a way technologies are agnostic.

We develop a technology almost always because we see at least an opportunity for some low-hanging fruit. We don't always see at the time when we're developing the technology and it's being initially deployed how it's going to be used in the end. What is the killer application isn't always the first thing that we've done. It's almost never a single technology that leads to that killer application and disruption.

One of the challenges is that what we need to do is create the ecosystem and the environment that encourages the creativity to push new ideas out as far as they can. Some of them will die because it turns out that either the technology isn't viable or the market isn't there, and others will go forward.

I feel it's the ecosystem, the people in it, and the ability to identify and advance the state of a technology from an initial discovery in a laboratory all the way to a prototype that's integrated so that we can put into the hands of industry; that's what we need to focus on.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Dr. Fitzgibbons.

[Kevin Fitzgibbons]

I'll take it, but no, I'm actually a Mr.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

We'll give you an honorary today, okay?

[Kevin Fitzgibbons]

I'll take it, honorary.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

What do you view as the roles of applied versus basic research in the development of a disruptive technology?

[Kevin Fitzgibbons]

Well, I think it's important for us, at least from NSERC, to.... We tend not to use that kind of terminology because in many cases it's really up to the research itself as to where it goes and the course. That being said, and maybe to build on some of the discussions we've had earlier, our job at NSERC first and foremost is, for example, how to identify what's going on. Through the process of peer review we have 3,000 to 12,000 applications a year that come in from researchers around the country proposing ideas that they consider to be world class, ideas on science and knowledge that are above the grade. That's not only in Canada; we're talking globally.

The job of the peer reviewers, the people who understand those fields, is to understand whether they are actually working in areas that are exciting. Are they working in areas where there's growth? That's on the one side, and you need to continually have that because every other country in the world is doing the same thing. This is a constant of development that we can't miss out on.

The crux of the issue always comes down to how you apply that effectively. Again, we're back to the question of talking to those who are actually facing problems, be it market, be it social, and being able to say the knowledge that you have or the discoveries that you've made can help with what my issue may be.

Perhaps I may pick up a little bit on your discussion with Dan here about how you can tell when we're going to move to a disruptive piece. I think one of the things that is very evident here is that there's a price point. Probably the best example of that is in the information and communication technologies. Some of you may be familiar with what's called Moore's law, where the principle basically is a straight line—for every year there's a doubling in the power and halving of the price.

We're now into the third decade of Moore's law, and we're being able to do things that were unimaginable even two years ago. It's not only one little device that's involved. It's the whole knowledge that's come back and forth from the university community. Basic research, by the way, is not only done in universities. It is done in other institutions.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much, Mr. Fitzgibbons and Mr. Regan.

I was disruptive in the sense of messing up the schedule so it will seem like I'm playing favourites, but I'm not. It should have been a Conservative when I recognized Mr. Regan, so it will be two Conservatives now.

Mr. Carmichael.

[John Carmichael, Conservative, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I'm entirely forgiving of transgressions, etc.

Good morning to our witnesses.

I have several questions I'd like to embark on. I like the idea of starting with a definition. Both Mr. Fitzgibbons and Dr. Hewitt provided some definition and I liked Dr. Wayner's description of that hockey team. I have a young grandson who I've watched many times playing this season in a house league. You watch 10 little people chasing a puck into a corner and colliding, and everybody is on the ice and nobody is quite sure what to do. So I like the idea of finding a sort of foundational definition that we can work with to help keep us focused as well.

Both Mr. Fitzgibbon and Dr. Hewitt, I thought, took good stabs at that. I come from the car business and I remember back to my days long ago. You would visit the factory and you'd see models cutting clay. We're all very excited about seeing those models today; they're all developed on CAD or CAM today. You never see a clay model or you seldom see a clay model today. What was a seven to 10-year process, today is 24 to 30 months, and maybe even hours in some cases in terms of refinements and whatnot. So I find the definitions of applying these technologies interesting.

I wonder if the two of you could take a minute to expand or help us to synthesize the definition of where you would encourage us to embark.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

I think this is a very good question, and as you noted, it gets at something I talked about that I want to emphasize once again.

In this model that we tend to apply we think of basic research moving down a continuum to application. Then we ask the question about where the eureka moment lies.

What I want to suggest, and this comes back to something Kevin had said and Dan had emphasized as well, is that eureka moment quite often doesn't come from the scientist himself or herself. It may not even come from the research process itself, but from other members of the team so to speak, as you put it, who through their own lens have a look at a particular technology or consider some technology as disruptive through the lens of what a market might like, what might in fact generate significant interest from investors, what might in fact change the game completely.

That involves, and that implies, as you suggest, a team approach whereby scientists are working with social scientists and experts from business, economics, or anthropology, in order to develop those disruptive elements, because we know for example there are lots of technologies that wouldn't be considered disruptive until somebody gets the idea of how to make them disruptive. That speaks to Dan's point.

If you think about the automobile as a good example, a design is another key aspect of this. The automobile we currently know in some respects fulfills the same function as it has since the very beginning of its invention, for 100 years. In fact, apparently it doesn't even get much better gas mileage somebody told me.

But in terms of the design elements within the car, I would be willing to bet—you know the industry better than I do—most of the design elements have less to do with driving the car and more to do with the driver's experience. Whether your Bluetooth hooks into this or whether you can surf the web or how comfortable your seating is or how much attention you're paying to the road, or in my car, I have a system that will brake automatically for me in the event I'm not paying attention.

These things came from engineers but they also came from other social scientists, even humanists, who would have been able to provide the human aspect to the inventions or to the technology that was developed. It is a team effort, and it focuses on a lot more than the technology itself. The last point I would make, just to reiterate, is that quite often the disruptive element really comes from thinking about how these things are going to be used at the end of the day.

[Kevin Fitzgibbons]

I'll probably be saying very much the same thing but through a slightly different lens. I actually harken back to a couple of days ago when I read the presentation that was given by Industry Canada. They talk very much about disruptive as having a certain number of characteristics in terms of its impact.

First of all there is a market impact. Is it changing the way you do business or what you buy significantly? Does it put other people out of business? That's a disruption in the market. Is it changing the way people behave, for example to access to information both good and bad?

The second thing is that it's moving very quickly, and it's moving globally. I think if you're looking at it from an impact at those kinds of levels, I think it allows you to get a better feeling on how we're going to do that.

I'm coming back to the same thing that I think all three of us are saying. In and of itself, the technology is only a technology that does things. It's to do something, how and what. It is from the brilliance of innovation and innovators, but it's a neutral thing. It's just an advancing of things that get smaller, that are more intelligent.

How they are used...totally. The best example that struck me was the Arab Spring. They called it the Facebook.... No one could have possibly imagined that having these kinds of technologies in hand would have changed so significantly the course of history in many cases, in Egypt for example. We have no way. But certainly that was disruptive.

[John Carmichael, Conservative, Don Valley West, ON]

Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but I know the chair's going to cut me off.

Dr. Wayner, in your opening remarks you passed very quickly by personalized medicine as being an area that will be disruptive. I wonder if you could expand on that thought a bit.

[Dr. Danial Wayner]

The genomics era allows us to understand the machinery that is responsible for our health, our welfare, and our well-being.

The initial views of personalized medicine are that, because we are mostly genetically the same but there are small differences, it's those small differences that change the way, for example, we would respond to a certain drug. If we could actually understand those to the point where your physician would be able to say, “You should take this therapeutic instead of that one because I know that this one you'll respond to and that one you won't”....

That's sort of the initial stage, and we're starting to see evidence of that now just from the sheer volume of genetic information we have. We hear about initiatives around the world like the $1,000 genome. You'd be able to map each individual's genome for $1,000. We're not there yet, but when we are there and when we learn how to mine the information—and I want to refer to Dr. Hewitt when I say this—and when we understand how we're going to manage that information....

There are huge social issues related to somebody else having my entire genome in their hands, but those are the types of advances we'll see over the next decade or two or three. I think that will fundamentally change the way we approach health care and wellness.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much, Mr. Wayner and Mr. Carmichael.

Now we'll go on to Mr. Daniel for eight minutes.