Good morning. My name is Neil Fassina.
I am the president of Okanagan College in British Columbia.
My route to becoming a college president is somewhat unusual, having started my academic career in three U15 universities, followed by a vice-presidency at a polytechnic and a presidency at a research-intensive university. I mention my career path only insofar as it has provided me with an invaluable insight into the different and complementary roles of colleges, polytechnics and universities in the Canadian research ecosystem.
Colleges occupy a special space in the post-secondary landscape because they are deeply embedded in the communities we serve. Aligning with the needs of our communities, colleges provide relevant and responsive solutions that empower people of all ages and from all walks of life to transform themselves and the communities they call home.
Regrettably, most Canadians have limited awareness of the significant impact colleges have in this country. They know colleges offer amazing entry to practice by reskilling or upskilling learning opportunities. What is less understood, however, is the high-impact applied research taking place in our communities in partnership with colleges across all sectors of the economy.
Imagine, if you will, not an individual, but a team of highly qualified professionals and students collectively helping a community, an entrepreneur, a business or a government solve a real-life problem by applying the same rigorous scientific methods used by scholars throughout the world.
Team-based applied research thrives in the college environment because the primary goal of these teams is to strengthen the social, economic and cultural fabric of the communities, rather than publishing their work downstream so that they can be credited with advancing a field of practice. These teams stay laser-focused on the problem at hand, because they are not concerned about complex IP agreements, as IP stays whole and with the research partner. In short, these teams are driven to find affordable, effective and scalable solutions to real-world problems.
“Where's the benefit to the college?”, you may ask. It's in the immediate impact on our communities, with demonstrable outcomes typically occurring within one to three years. It is in the impact on our learners, who will take the skills they develop through applied research to become lifelong innovators in our communities. It is in the impact in our classrooms as the applied research projects inform our curriculum.
That said, colleges face a disproportionate challenge in the research space, to a great extent because they're much newer.
When we compare the relatively short history of applied research in colleges to the lengthy history of pure research in universities, one might draw on the analogy of comparing an entrepreneurial start-up to an established corporation. Colleges have bootstrap resources to create a thriving research start-up that has a real-life impact in our communities, having been supported by what amounts to minimally viable research infrastructure. Anyone who has been an entrepreneur or has worked with one knows, however, that the transition from start-up to scale-up requires investment.
Drawing further on this analogy, the applied research environments of colleges have exhausted the “friends and family” round of fundraising and are now in need of real external equity to scale up and create a parity of impact alongside our university partners.
We have reached a turning point in our storyline, at which the contemporary and impactful role of applied research in colleges needs to be valued with the same respect and esteem as the pure research environments of universities. By investing resources and supporting research projects and the underlying research infrastructure in both of these complementary systems, Canada is poised to become a global innovation hub.
To truly recognize the power of complementarity, however, colleges need to be supported differently from universities. If the applied research arena of colleges is assumed to be the same as a university or is restricted by requiring university partners, then the true impact of applied research will be proportionately diminished.
Take, for example, an area in which college applied research teams shine: supporting organizations through the innovation valley of death. There is funding that supports pure research, which is incredibly valuable in the university context, and private equity supports the scaling and development of a product that has been proven to be commercially viable. In between those two areas is the space where colleges do their applied research.
Colleges fill this gap by providing research and development support, proof of concept and high-fidelity testing that is financially unattainable for small start-up organizations. For example, at Okanagan College, we have a CFI- and NSERC-funded biology lab that helps start-up food and beverage companies test for bacterial contamination so that they can get their product to market more quickly. This lab has equipment that small companies won't be able to access, and they don't have the expertise to use it. Having access to it at Okanagan College means the difference between these entrepreneurs being limited to farmers markets versus becoming a commercially viable food producer to address issues of food security.
In closing, I would encourage the committee to consider the real-life impact of applied research that happens in our communities in partnership with colleges across the country. This impact is within reach of being scalable, but only if colleges are treated with the same respect and esteem extended to our university colleagues through support for research and its underlying infrastructure in colleges and independent of the support for universities. In doing so, you can empower innovators, entrepreneurs, communities and governments to be innovation hubs, thereby transforming the communities that we all call home.
Thank you.