David Watters, CEO of Global Advantage Consulting Group Inc and a former DM, Finance Canada

Where have all the researchers gone?

By David Watters

Keep your eye on the ball! How often did we hear this advice from parents and coaches as we grew up and learned to play sports. Sound advice with wide applications. For example, most commentary on the lacklustre performance of Canada's R&D/innovation ecosystem focuses on the $31 billion we spend on "research". But a majority of these costs are to pay for "researchers". So where are these researchers and what are they doing? How well are they performing?

Unfortunately the results of such an investigation are surprising. Statistics Canada tracks the number of personnel engaged in R&D in Canada. In 2008 we had about 257,000 research personnel conducting research in Canada. But by 2012 this had declined by 13% to 224,000. What happened? Why did 33,000 researchers lose their jobs? How can Canada hope to improve its overall R&D performance if we are losing our core research capability?

While this overall 13% decline in the number of Canadian research personnel is problematic, the performance is even more distressing when we examine the four categories of institutions who employ researchers and perform R&D (federal government, provincial governments, higher education sector, and private sector).

In this regard, the federal government employed about the same number of researchers over the period 2008 to 2012 (about 16,000 research personnel), while the 10 provincial governments lost only 180 researchers in total, and the higher education sector actually increased the number of research personnel it employs by 14% (an additional 8,840 researchers).

However, private sector employment of research personnel declined 24% over this period, losing 40,580 researchers! What happened? Why were they let go? What impact has this had on our R&D/innovation performance? What business pressures drove these decisions? At a time when business sector R&D/innovation is central to industry productivity and competitiveness, why are we heading in the wrong direction? And what can we do about it? Can we possibly discover some answers through a further look at the details of the data on research personnel? Let's try.

Canada's 223,930 R&D personnel are currently employed in the following four sectors as illustrated in the Total R&D Personnel chart:

Several points of interest arise from this distribution of research personnel, as follows:

• Although virtually all research personnel would be graduates of the higher education sector, only three of 10 remain employed in that sector (with seven of 10 employed elsewhere).

• As a result, what kind of "research" training do research personnel receive in higher education institutions – and to what extent is it relevant to employment challenges in other sectors?

• Since six of 10 research personnel are employed in the private sector, what kinds of research training and experiences (co-op placements, applied research projects with industry, international assignments) prepare them for challenges in the private sector?

• Further, since 56% of private sector research personnel are employed in Canada's service sector (73,489 researchers) what instruction and experience are they receiving in the higher education sector about how to conduct research in service industries? Do they get access to best global practices, training and experience?

Regarding earlier data about the 24% decline in researchers employed in the private sector over the past four years, the percentage decline in researcher employment in the three industry sub-sectors is as follows:

Service Sector 12% decline

Manufacturing Sector 33% decline

Other Sectors 44% decline

These data raise questions about the reasons behind the more modest decline in the employment of researchers in the service sector. Is the overall demand for researchers strengthening in this sector relative to other sectors? What are the reasons for a sharper decline of 44% in the other smaller sectors, like the natural resources sector, including agriculture and forestry? What are the reasons for a substantive decline of 33% in the manufacturing sector?

Are these sharp declines in the employment of research personnel just due to the global economic and financial crisis of 2009 or were there other explicit and targeted industry pressures and adjustments at play? If the strength of these downward trends continues, what will incent the private sector to engage more research personnel?

If the capacity of the private sector to absorb new knowledge from higher education research is currently so limited, why do governments keep investing even more money in supporting the upstream supply of further research? If we have a leaky pipeline downstream as it enters the private sector, shouldn't we try to fix this before continuing our efforts upstream in our higher education institutions to discover and send even more research-based knowledge through it?

As the public, private and higher education sectors take steps to find solutions to Canada's relatively poor R&D/innovation performance, this suggests that we need to understand better, the capabilities and activities of the 132,000 research personnel in Canada's private sector.

This would include an examination of the sharp decline in the employability of research personnel in the private sector, the research training they have received, the training they continue to access, how their research projects are identified and managed, and the incentive and reward systems that guide their performance.

Such a more in-depth and complete analysis will be important in order to identify new initiatives to improve the R&D/innovation performance of Canada's private sector. How can we best begin a dialogue on this issue?

David Watters is CEO of Global Advantage Consulting Group Inc and a former DM at Finance Canada