Madam Chair and committee members, thank you for the invitation to speak on this important topic.
Before we discuss how to promote more private sector investment into university research, I'd like to pause and rethink the question itself, because invention is not innovation. What leaves a university lab is an invention, an idea unconstrained by real-world requirements. Universities excel at generating these breakthrough discoveries. Canada is globally recognized for this strength. However, the private sector invests in innovation—technologies that have been validated, de-risked and ready to scale.
In the sectors I represent as the executive director of Reaction Hub—a scale-up and commercialization hub for chemical technologies and processes that span natural resources, energy, critical minerals and advanced materials—those real-world constraints are substantial. These are energy, safety, labour, environmental impacts, economics and physical scale. Universities are not designed to apply these constraints, and nor should they be expected to function as industrial innovation agencies.
This is the gap where so many Canadian technologies stall. The question is not how we grow private sector investment into emerging innovations from Canadian universities. The question is how we better prepare university inventions to become private sector investable innovations. There's no shortage of researchers eager to commercialize their work. Such national programs as i2I, or invention to Innovation, and Lab2Market are building the crucial talent pools, transferable skills and awareness, but interest in education alone is not enough. To advance innovation and enable the scale-up of Canadian technologies in Canada, I have three recommendations.
The first recommendation is to establish a standardized national framework for technology validation. Canada lacks a consistent, evidence-based way to assess the commercial feasibility of early-stage technologies. Without a shared framework, researchers, investors, industry and regulators often operate without clear communication, specifically around risk mitigation and potential incentives. That disconnect is a major contributor to what we all talk about as the valley of death.
Canada already has an international standard, ISO 14076, the environmental techno-economic assessment, or eTEA. Reaction Hub was one of two Canadian contributors on the ISO standards committee. These eTEAs translate scientific inventions into metrics that matter for economic and industrial decision-making. To accelerate the adoption, federal programs like IRAP, NSERC, ISED and NRCan can fund qualified providers to do eTEAs, integrate them into federally funded research and commercialization programs and expand existing training programs so that researchers can apply them themselves early.
The second recommendation is to facilitate early and structured engagement between universities in the broader innovation ecosystem. Innovation happens within a community of stakeholders, not within a single institution, so we must establish these consistent practices for engaging partners earlier to limit late-stage surprises due to insufficient analysis, poorly planned commercialization projects or incorrect budgeting practices. Establishing these new KPIs and reporting metrics for funding programs that promote this early engagement between academic researchers and ecosystem partners can help align incentives and minimize unforeseen roadblocks.
The third recommendation is to fund national programs that connect fragmented provincial innovation efforts. Across Canada, government investments are often under-leveraged, because our funding programs operate in regional silos. National mandates delivered through provincial frameworks often lead to duplicated programs, gaps for the mid-stage of development, barriers to accessing infrastructure across the different provinces and a patchwork of funding strategies that make national coordination difficult. We need true connection funding, programs that link research outputs from universities to pilot facilities, demonstration sites, service providers and industry partners across the country. These programs should build on experienced agencies and existing infrastructure, not create new layers of competition. Since ecosystems generate retained operational knowledge, each subsequent project an ecosystem works on advances more efficiently and with lower risk than the last.
To end off, Canada is a world leader in invention, but invention alone does not build companies, industries or national competitiveness. This is a global challenge. If Canada wants to lead, we must evolve our systems to enable innovation by, one, preparing inventions to scale; two, supporting the ecosystems that de-risk them; and three, aligning our national policies with the full commercialization pathway.
Current estimates suggest that more than $275 trillion would be needed to reach net zero by 2050 with existing technology development systems, a sign that our models of innovation are not working fast enough. In a moment of nation building, we can strengthen our domestic supply chains and build critical infrastructure, but we can also build the processes and policies that turn Canada's research excellence into a global competitive advantage.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.