Industry Committee on June 20th, 2017

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

That's good. Thank you very much.

We're going to move to Mr. Longfield.

You have seven minutes.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thanks to our witnesses. These are great conversations at this committee. I wish we had more time. That's what I say every time I get up.

I want to focus my questions around the technology access centres that you mentioned, Mr. van den Berg. I had a business back in the early 1980s, when I was developing some solutions for industry. On the weekends I was putting together some ideas. I can remember selling an idea to the American government for 300 systems. It was a really good thing for my business. I put it together on the weekend. I sold it on Monday morning, and then we tried to build it in quantity and then get money into our business so we could go again. I remember my dad asking me if I would patent it. I said, Dad, I'm chasing the next order. I have to keep my business going. There wasn't a technology access centre that could have done the prototyping I did in my garage on the weekend.

In rural Canada in particular, in small business in particular, those are the supports that we need out in the field. Could you maybe go into that a little bit more for our testimony?

[Bert van den Berg]

Sure. A technology access centre, on average, has between three and 10 employees. They're located in places as remote, let's say, as Grande Prairie and Victoriaville, I believe. Their business model is to offer technical services, small applied research projects, and specialized training on the equipment expertise they have that's different from what the college has, and for that they will be charging business clients.

What it means is that they are responsive, so they do answer the phone and they do say, yes, how can we help? They do want to serve the clients. The one in Grande Prairie is focused on beekeeping, on the health of bees. There are all sorts of different technology access centres, but essentially because they're focused and they're interested in serving clients, they help with the technology de-risking, what you talked about: building a prototype, testing the prototype, understanding what the environment is. They are connected to the local IRAP agents. Sometimes the IRAP agents are there. They're connected to the local economic development organizations, which often are partners in the centre. Then, in effect, you have a lever for bigger impact in the centre.

The Quebec example really was compelling when we looked at it five or eight years ago. While our centres now are on the scale of 1:1, $1 for a $1 investment, the Quebec centres are well past that. As they build a reputation, as they build a network, they're very effective in the local community in terms of having impact.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

There are two things from my story. One was that I needed a fast response. I remember it was about a $30,000 order, and for me that was a really big deal. I didn't get a second order. It went to the United States. They probably saw how I did what I did, and they probably just duplicated it, so I didn't get any kind of lasting benefit.

As a business person, I didn't understand that at the time. I was in my twenties. How do we get small businesses to understand the value of the new products they're creating? How do we get rapid response back to those small businesses so they can get ongoing benefit from their ideas?

[Bert van den Berg]

Education is clearly an important part of that story, education in an informal fashion. As I say, these centres are connected to local actors, and they are able to help them connect to places to protect IP.

Very often the colleges are going to be looking at this and asking whether there's something in terms of IP there. They will often look at that, and if there is no tangible IP being created, they will give some advice back to the company and ask them to think about it. If there is tangible IP, they will say to think about protecting it, and provide some linkage to someone else who might help them protect the intellectual property.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

I'm going to focus on colleges as well.

Mr. Hewitt, I was a graduate of Red River College, so I'm kind of biased towards colleges in the first place. You have seen using colleges and universities together to solve some of the problems with a rapid response. You've seen doing that through consortium. I'm thinking that in Newfoundland or in rural Saskatchewan they might not have the same access, so they are making great farm machines, but they are doing it on their own. They don't go for outside help where they could get it.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

I think that makes sense and it's an amazing idea. I was out not that long ago at Red River College, so I'm well aware of the capacity to undertake work there in many fields.

I was looking at a program of early childhood education, which is now being exported globally. The methodology they are using in inner-city Winnipeg is now said to be used in Africa and Latin America.

I think where that makes sense is with the technology transfer group. The consortium we developed in southwestern Ontario did have as partners Fanshawe College and one other college as well. Anytime you can do that, it creates benefit.

I think their pitch was that they had some of the equipment and they had some of the ability to do that rapid testing that the universities didn't have, and that provided a very nice piece to the broader process undertaken through the university. Where that can happen, it should absolutely.

[Bert van den Berg]

I would just like to underline that, as you know, your typical SME is going to make a decision on a project in days or weeks and is going to need to have the results in weeks. In that space, they are not particularly interested in defining a longer-term collaboration, and so the centres really help in that regard.

That said, for those companies that are looking at IP and looking at a longer-term development process and can cobble together the pieces to support that, we link colleges and universities together in supporting that kind of collaboration. It's more complex, and many of the commercializations don't need that, but it is a possibility.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

To go back to the island of broken toys, or whatever that—

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

It's misfit toys.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

The Island of Misfit Toys—that's it. We need more feet on the street. Would the government have to play a role in getting those feet on the street, or do we have some delivery mechanisms in place that we can be leveraging? I'm thinking of IRAP or NSERC.

[Bert van den Berg]

I think IRAP with its 250 ITAs is excellent in working with companies. They reach 9,000 companies for advice. NSERC is partnering with 3,600 companies. My vision is that NSERC is helping de-risk technology for the small companies, and IRAP.... I shouldn't speak for it, but my sense is that it is increasingly working with businesses to help them grow. But perhaps once they have the technology, it will de-risk it. It is really focusing on advice, so it is helping the company understand what it needs to do to move forward, and it is looking for companies with a vision towards export and growth.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Maybe part of the study is encouraging that to continue or expand.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

I think part of it has to be creating a sense of collaboration in that community, because the options out there at the municipal, provincial, and federal level are mind-boggling.

The only other thing I would say is that in this repository of misfit toys, some are very cool. I've seen hand-held 3-D scanners, 360-degree cameras. Can you buy one? I know that the technology exists, so why doesn't it get out there?

Part of it has to do with companies. Companies quite often, I think as you mentioned, have the firm belief that working with universities or even colleges is not worth their time, that it's hard, and that they're not going to get anything out of it or that it's going to take years. In fact, in my experience, where companies have worked with universities, that hasn't been the case. They don't like to advertise that fact, because if they say they have an excellent working relationship with university X or college Y, they have just told their competitors that this is where the competitors need to be too, so quite often people don't talk about their good experiences. They talk about what doesn't work. We have to get over that as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you.

We're going to move to Mr. Nuttall.

You have five minutes.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the presenters today and certainly to Mr. Hewitt for the written comments as well.

Going through some of your remarks, I note that you talk about how essentially the process needs to change to perhaps bring in the private sector earlier on to identify and shape the research towards where they are looking for answers. I guess my first question would be—and you started to go into it just now—whether the issue is that the private sector just isn't willing or that no entity exists to really combine academia with the private sector.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

I would say there are multiple entities. We talked about IRAP and certainly the technology access centres and so forth.

A lot of this will depend on the ability of a business or a company to, in the first place, identify opportunity. That's partly an educational activity, and it's partly a selling job that universities and colleges need to do. It's what I used to do; I'd just go visit.

The structures for that are more difficult. In terms of the early access or collaborative research activity, there is quite a bit of that in Canada already, about a billion dollars' worth. What people are doing now at the Montreal Neurological Institute and particularly at the Structural Genomics Consortium in Toronto is different. They are bringing companies into the research process—particularly the Structural Genomics Consortium—at a very early stage, and they are paying to have access so they can be at the table when discoveries are made and then collaborate work with the researchers and inventors to move those to market.

All that early stage, research is never lost because it's all made public. It's all out there as opposed to research that starts in a company lab or in a company facility where it's all protected to the very bitter end. Companies have the opportunity to save a lot of money. They don't have to invest in a lot of early-stage development. They can pick up a technology at the point where they can use it and then protect it, and then off they go, and everybody's happy. That's the exception right now. If I were a vice-president of research these days in Canada, creating more of those would be my objective.

You are currently up against a cultural wall that would render that fairly difficult, in part because of the way researchers approach this, in part because of the way companies approach the exercise, and in part because of the way tech transfer offices manage that process. I'm pretty convinced, though, from having a look at this, that it make sense in that model.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Are you aware of the $950 million fund that was created in the last budget for superclusters, etc.?

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

Yes.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Where do you see that fitting into solving some of these issues? Obviously those clusters are going to include academia, the private sector, research institutes, etc.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

We are responsible for agencies that fund primarily fundamental research or earlier-stage research. We haven't worked directly with the organizations or agencies that will deliver that program. At face value, from my perspective and given my university experience, this will be a huge catalyst towards moving information from the universities and colleges into businesses that directly participate in that, and they will facilitate that kind of collaboration in a very direct way. How that plays out, at the end of the day, I can't comment on, but if it puts people in the same room, and they're focused on the same object, they are bound to start moving ideas, in my experience.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

I have an interesting riding, because I have a fairly urban part in Barrie but very rural parts as well. One of the issues we've been facing is that we just don't have anything like the accelerator centre there. Also, in the rural areas where there is the space for companies to grow.... I think of Napoleon Wolf Steel right off the bat. Basically, a man's research in his garage turned into a company that has 1,800 employees today. However, there is no broadband or anything along those lines where the facility is.

While there may be offices in these rural areas, are there any other inhibitors you see to helping in rural areas where somebody may be coming up with a new piece of technology, but there's not necessarily the access there is in more urban areas, whether London, Waterloo, or Toronto?

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Be very brief.

[Dr. Ted Hewitt]

I'm going to turn it over to Bert, but I can tell you that our agency has funded research on precisely these questions on rural access, services, and infrastructure. So, if you like, I could take that as homework, and we could dig out some material for you.