There's no recession in research: Report from Innovation 2010

ACCT Canada's conference Innovation 2010 concluded yesterday having featured some excellent discussions on building out the Canadian innovation system. Coming on the heels of the successful Polytechnics Canada Showcase, Innovation 2010 brought together R&D professionals from across the country to talk about action steps for continuing to build a complementary R&D system in the country. This is a good evolution from my first experience with the ACCT conference where the discussion was about why collaborate in the PSE sector to how should we collaborate to better enable industry to get inventions and innovations to market.

There were many excellent presentations and discussions - the format was particularly amenable to fostering lots of good dialog. Several things stuck out for me: SSHRC President Chad Gaffield spoke of the emergence of "people centred innovation" that he feels defines the 21st century. This resonates with me strongly given my own focus on human-centred design and how GBC Research integrates this into our approach to the diffusion of innovation. Steven Liss, VPR Queen's University, talked about how we should "own the podium" with respect to R&D and its commercialization. This echoes the "aggressive commercialization" that John Molloy (Partek, also at Queen's) made (see my note on my R&D Panel submission). Owning the podium means we need to pick winners and set priorities,which is in contrast to the usual approach Canada takes where we seek fair representation from all regions/sectors.

The title of this post is taken from a comment said to me by Brian Barber, VP of UHN's Development Corporation. He was referring to the fact that, even though there is a world wide recession that is impacting the availability of capital to take ideas to market, there is no shortage of ideas emerging from the research labs and industry partners we collectively engage with. This is a good reminder to focus our innovation efforts well.

A BERD in the hand...

A report out today shows a drop in BERD for the third straight year. This is a real problem for Canadian productivity. We need to realign the HERD|BERD imbalance in order to arrest our innovation free-fall. This news comes fast on the heels of the recent report that BERD dropped in the US for the first time since tracking began. The recession is being blamed for the Canadian BERD drop, but as I indicated in my last post, there's no recession in research. Further, if history is our guide, recessions are times when we must push ahead on innovation.

A related story shows that stock markets punish those firms that invest in innovation. This is a sad statement and indictment of the kind of short term thinking that gave rise to the economic meltdown in the first place.

Drop in BERD troubling

I saw a recent news story on US business expenditures on R&D (BERD) having dropped for the first time in the 13 years the sort of study has been conducted. When Googling for a link to the story I found a report that the same is true for the European Union. This is troubling, particularly given that times of recession are better times than most to invest in R&D and innovation. We need industry to step up and invest. College applied research funding programs such as the NSERC CCIP are de facto instruments of the state to socialize industry to spend on R&D, giving our student innovation literacy in the process. This point is made in the recent Conference Board of Canada report on applied research.

Applied research and the Canadian innovation system

The ACCC Applied Research Symposium convened in Ottawa these past two days, offering an opportunity for college researchers and administrators to discuss the maturing of the applied research sector. Highlights included talks by the presidents of SSHRC and NSERC, and VPs from CIHR and CFI. The message common to all three was the need to involve end users or end points in research. That is, research should be applied and involve those who will use the results at the outset, as well as be concerned with the downstream effects or implications. Applied research, according to the Frascati Manual, includes original investigation, but is focused on solving problems. This is the design behind setting national research priorities. Fostering a national research agenda that articulates complementary organizations into a network value chain will help us increase social and economic productivity by more effectively translating the investments we make in R&D in meaningful outcomes where this is applicable. This is especially important given that the Conference Board of Canada has once again given Canada's innovation capacity a "D" grade, saying "The Canadian economy remains a below-average performer on its capacity to innovate."

College applied research is an important component of the national innovation system, and can increase economic and social productivity in Canada in concert with industry, community and academic partners by mobilizing our students, faculty  and industry partners to address innovation gaps. Our focus is on the downstream net effects of equipping students with innovation literacy and the skills for the innovation economy, on fostering job-ready graduates who not only get the job, but get the job done. The ACCC Applied Research Symposium showcased our collective efforts at engaging industry in R&D. Other highlights included panels on industry engagement (GBC project partner Infonaut CEO Niall Wallace was a highlight of this panel), faculty and student engagement, and the ACCC's Science, Technology and Innovation Committee. Social innovation was also a topic, acknowledging the importance of the social sciences as a complement to the science and technology focus of most sponsored research. This underscores an important point raised by Paul Ledwell, Vice-President of the Public Policy Forum: we need to foster knowledge networks that have at their core knowledge translators - people who can translate research into the lived reality. The ability to translate is at the core of innovation literacy, and ensuring this translation is our collective responsibility.

An article in the Globe on Wednesday coincided with the first day of the Symposium and offered an excellent and timely call to action. What's cooking in Canadian innovation by Daniel Schwanen from the Centre for International Governance Innovation call for a more concerted effort to focus on fostering winners in our innovation ecosystem and how we can encourage (and so discourage) innovation by artificially "propping up" industries that do not perform.Schwanen echoes the need for "clearly evoked goals" in our national research agenda, and encourages us to "also think beyond narrowly defined science and technology. Science and technology are the foundation of future economic success, but innovation in culture, design, education or business and government processes can add value too." He ends with his cooking analogy"

In short, gathering the building blocks of innovation and expecting it to occur is not a sufficient strategy for the times. It is like expecting one will operate a successful restaurant by building a state-of-the-art kitchen and gathering the ingredients, without paying much attention to the staff, the recipes, or to creating an engaging atmosphere. Given the fiscal straits emerging out of the recession, it's time to ask again what's cooking in Canadian innovation.

The Canadian innovation system requires a complementary approach that articulates universities, government labs and colleges working together with industry toward common goals of national importance. The recipe for success in fostering innovation is in this mix.

Infrastructure or, The City We Want

In catching up on the past couple of weeks, I've been reviewing my notes from the Toronto Forum for Global Cities, held 8-9 December. A key focus of this event was public infrastructure spending, certainly a hot topic in these dire economic times, but also relevant to GBC's new campus plans. Against the backdrop of economic gloom, infrastructure spending creates jobs and the necessary physical space for future productivity. Commensurate with the need to update and prepare our physical resources for the future is the need to prepare what I earlier called the infrastructure of the mind: readying the future workforce for an active role as "demanders of innovation" within the Innovation Agenda.

Toronto Mayor David Miller spoke about the importance of the public library as a place for incidental education, and an important locus for immigrant populations to learn and access information resources. I was reminded of Manual Castells's work on the "space of flows" and the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in essentially shrinking and linking the globally networked world. The public library system, as a basic public infrastructure, enables the formation of social capital and the integration of new immigrant populations into the local body politic. This social capital is translated into economic productivity as these new populations integrate within the local environment while simultaneously changing the local environment to reflect new perspectives. This is an important driver of innovation - incremental social change which has economic implications. This environment of social capital formation emerges from the physical infrastructure of the public library - the basis for 21st century social and economic productivity. I'm filling in much of the subtext to Miller's speech, though he did end by saying "Cities are our future - the creative economy, research, immigrants - all come together in the city." The creative economy, an allusion to Richard Florida's work, is the purview of GBC's role in preparing graduates for future workplace demands. As I have said earlier, Innovation literacy forms the cornerstone of this demand.

Gary Doer, Premier of Manitoba, also spoke at the Forum of the need to invest in education and training infrastructure, particularly in colleges where there is more capability to fill the demand for highly qualified and skilled people. Sandra Pupatello, Ontario Minister of International Trade and Investment, echoed this, and reiterated the Innovation Agenda that the Ontario government is "moving at the speed of business." This means mobilizing all government levels and departments to be responsive to industry.

I liken this to the concept of a virtual research cluster and the "collaborate to compete model." Regionally focused innovation strategies work because they pool resources from disparate sources so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Balkanization is not the answer, especially in a recession. This is an opportunity for all of us engaged in the R&D value or innovation chain to foster improved social and economic productivity by helping industries avoid market failure while we reposition our infrastructure to advance things like the green economy and sustainability.