David Crane

Public-private innovation at the local level

By David Crane

Over the past two decades plant closings and lost jobs have become commonplace across the southern Ontario industrial heartland. Once-powerful corporations that built household appliances such as refrigerators and stoves, tires and chemicals, furniture and clothing, farm machinery, autos and auto parts or processed foods have closed plants and left hard-hit communities in their wake.

But some city governments, working with universities, colleges and the private sector — and tapping into federal and provincial funding — are reinventing themselves for the knowledge economy, with its need for constant innovation through research and development, new skills and commercialization. A key way they are doing this is through support for public-private innovation parks. London and Hamilton — both hard hit by industrial change and new competition — are two good examples.

The goal is to help existing businesses, such as steel and machinery in Hamilton and auto parts and building materials in London, develop new products, processes and skills by fostering cooperation between private industry and the research and skills strengths of local universities and colleges.

This approach gives industry access to researchers and facilities, facilitates start-ups and commercialization of new knowledge, provides training for new skills, and attracts outside investment for new businesses and jobs. It recognizes that the success of Canada's efforts to improve its innovation performance will depend on what happens at the local level.

Following a 2009 Economic Summit on the loss of manufacturing, the City of London recognized that its future was closely linked to advanced manufacturing, with Western University and Fanshawe College seen as key assets. So it set aside 129.3 acres of land it was holding for industrial development, with 38.2 acres allocated to Western University and Fanshawe College for an Advanced Manufacturing Park.

The remaining 91.1 million acres were retained by the city for advanced manufacturing industries. It defined these as "any manufacturing, research or training facility which is focussed on use of advanced materials and structures, including metals and composite materials, precision tooling and equipment including medical devices, environ- ment and energy research or manufacturing facilities".

The City of London also donated $10 million towards the construction of the recently opened Fraunhofer Project Centre for Composites Research. The centre is managed by Germany's highly-regarded Fraunhofer Institute, in cooperation with Western's department of engineering, the first such Fraunhofer project in Canada. The centre is targeting the automotive, aviation, building materials and medical devices sectors, with its industrial-scale advanced machinery for carbon fibres and other composites, helping, it hopes, make London a leading centre for composites research and applications.

A group of companies — Ford, General Motors, Continental Structural Plastics, DSM Composite Resins and Dieffenbacher — have contributed $7.2 million in cash or in-kind. According to Tobias Potyra, a senior Fraunhofer engineer and the centre's manager, several research contracts with companies have been signed and others are in negotiation, suggesting some receptor capacity in the region.

At the project's recent opening cere-mony, Ottawa announced a contribution of $13. 7 million — $7.9 million to support construction of an Advanced Manufacturing Park Centre, with incubation and research space for 10-20 companies, and $5.8 million for additional capital equipment in the composites centre. The Ontario Research Fund provided $2.4 million for research projects.

The Advanced Manufacturing Park, though still in early days, is also home to the new WindEEE Dome, the most advanced experimental facility in North America to study the effects of damaging winds, including tornadoes, cyclones and transient shear flows, on buildings and structures.

Meanwhile, in Hamilton, the McMaster Innovation Park is more advanced. In January, 2005, McMaster University purchased a 37-acre block of industrial land. This had been home to Camco, Canada's largest household appliance manufacturer, which had closed its doors in 2004 with a loss of 1,000 jobs. McMaster paid $13 million, with $5 million from the City of Hamilton and $10 million from the Ontario government. At the same time, the Martin government approved the move of CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory from Ottawa to Hamilton, where it opened in 2011, bringing it much closer to Ontario's steel and auto industries.

The park also houses The Atrium@MIP, a facility that houses 31 tenants, including companies, research groups and Mohawk College offices, as well as an incubation centre. The McMaster Automotive Research Centre is nearing completion and is expected to eventually employ 150-200 researchers as well as helping to train new researchers. It will focus on hybrid technologies, new materials and automotive software and systems. Last year the federal government announced up to $11.5 million in funding to advance automotive research at McMaster. Now, plans are underway for a major Health and Life Sciences centre and for a hotel.

The key test in London and Hamilton is the extent to which the innovation parks deliver value to existing businesses, help launch new ones and attract new investment from outside the community. The McMaster Atrium has attracted, for example, Norjohn Ltd, which uses emulsion chemistry to develop green building products, NDE Enterprises, which uses ultrasound to test the integrity of welds in pipelines and refineries, and Hy-Nano, a venture developing the use of nano-particles as coatings for glass.

The Atrium is also home to the Centre for Surgical Invention and Innovation, one of the accelerator and commercialization networks established by the Harper government in 2009. It is working closely with McDonald Dettweiler, which has a major facility in nearby Brampton, to develop robotic systems for much less invasive surgical procedures.

Innovation parks offer a big opportunity for cities to re-invent themselves and bring about urban regeneration, provided they are well focussed on industry needs. This is critical across southern Ontario, where manufacturers continue to face huge competitive challenges. Innovation ultimately happens at the local level, so while federal and provincial policies clearly matter, implementation and results depend on local innovation systems, as London and Hamilton hope to show.

David Crane can be reached at crane@interlog.com.