Industry committee  I'll preface this by saying this is outside my particular expertise. Our experience, at least at Mitacs, has been that the projects we're engaged in are relatively short term, so the projects tend to be somewhere like four to eight months. Often the research going on there doesn'

Industry committee  Maybe I'll lead off. I'm not sure about that model in particular, but I will suggest, both from our experience at Mitacs and my personal experience in academia, that the demands on professors' time tend to preclude a lot of this sort of activity. My background is in biochemistry

Industry committee  No, and I have to agree with those statements. I'll add one more, which is that because we don't have a lot of large companies in Canada, we also don't tend to produce people with the experience to be R and D managers within smaller companies. In the United States, you'll often h

Industry committee  It could invest in our management program. No—

Industry committee  I think what Monsieur Fortin was talking about in terms of increasing some of the competitive pressures, so that there's the need to innovate, may well be part of it. Companies will recognize that they need to be doing more R and D on an ongoing basis.

Industry committee  I'm sorry, but I am going to answer you in English. I think researchers are all a little bit anxious because of this pull, which Mr. Fortin mentioned as well, between discovery research and sponsored or industry-focused research. I'm not exactly sure where that balance is, and

Industry committee  We're working on it. I don't know if it's necessarily a quick fix per se. The challenge, of course, is that it's a bit of a changing of culture in the business community. In other countries there's greater receptivity to hiring PhDs for non-specific technical tasks, and you have

Industry committee  I would just make one very brief comment, because I know we're pressed for time. I agree that there are a lot of potential gains to be made from standardizing things, but at the same time, I think it's important to recognize that this may not necessarily be the right answer eithe

Industry committee  I'm afraid I can't comment. I don't have any particular expertise in the area.

Industry committee  I can speak just a little bit about the Mitacs experience with that. What you say is correct. There are a lot of demands on a professor's time. In addition to teaching and research, there are administrative duties; there are all sorts of duties. So there's no doubt.... We have

Industry committee  Thanks for the question. Yes, absolutely, we are seeing it. You point out rightly that there is a bit of a delay. We are very much still a research organization, so we don't tend to work very close to the commercialization end. We're really more in the middle, not right at the v

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present to the committee today. My name is Rob Annan, and I am the director of policy, reporting and evaluation at Mitacs. Mitacs is a national research organization that suppor