Peter Morand

Is the NRC on the right track?

By Dr Peter Morand

An internal memorandum sent a few weeks ago by the National Research Council president to all personnel purports a new direction for Canada's national laboratories. Henceforth, NRC is to be "a purposeful outcome-based organization" with six major theme areas and four initially identified flagship programs. And staff has been told in no uncertain terms what will be expected of them in order to implement this strategy.

Sustaining the past is certainly not the way to go for any organization but drastic culture changes dictated from the top do not guarantee success. Further, to imply that NRC has been "sustaining" the past until now is, to put it charitably, inaccurate.

During the last decade NRC has become more and more focused on transferring its technology to the industrial sector through industrial alliances, licensing and the creation of spin-off and start-up companies. The Council's research institutes and technology centres have a high degree of accountability and autonomy and each has its custom-made approach to commercialization, policy and operations.

Institutes and technology centres have business development personnel charged with various aspects of commercialization (intellectual property (IP) protection, agreements with external commercial partners, licensing, identifying the commercialization approach for specific IP, developing overall strategy and process for commercialization, etc.) and are supported by NRC's corporate services.

Until relatively recently, the rewards for licensing and collaborative agreements far outweighed any benefits associated with involvement in a spin-off company. Other perceived barriers — loss of key personnel, additional costs and management time consumed in supporting the spin-off for the interim period and smoothing the relationship between spin-off and institute staff — helped instill a culture that did not favour spin-offs.

NRC management addressed some of these issues and put many initiatives in place to communicate the long-term benefits of company creation and to make it easier for researchers to be associated with spin-off companies. As a result there has been a significant increase in technology licensing and NRC spin-offs in the last few years and some of the NRC institutes have established commercialization incubators (e.g. NRC's Institute for Biodiagnostics in Winnipeg).

This trend constitutes an important contribution to Canada's innovation agenda and is in keeping with the federal government's current S&T Strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada's Advantage, which outlines how Canada can do more "…to turn our ideas into innovations that provide solutions to environmental, health, and other important social challenges, and to improve our economic competitiveness."

The Science, Technology and Innovation Council's State of the Nation 2008 report points out that Canada has strong foundations on which to build its innovation system but needs to address weaknesses and to find better mechanisms to improve its performance in order to "…be able to compete with the best."

How then can NRC seize on this opportunity to enhance its visibility in the innovation cycle and to demonstrate even more strongly that the investment in NRC's activities is paying huge dividends in the development of the advanced technology sectors that are crucial for Canada's economic well being?

considering other models

Instead of top down dicta aimed at changing the behaviour of NRC's cadre of inventors, discoverers and largely independent thinkers, why not develop an innovative commercialization model that would build on the intellectual assets of NRC and accelerate knowledge translation?

In other words, is it more feasible to:

* continue to make changes from within to make NRC an R&D/commercialization organization, or

* strengthen NRC's capabilities in strategic R&D areas as well as in industrial collaboration and alliances and leave the commercialization of its research results to a separate organization?

In respect to the first part of the question there are other factors at play, apart from motivation, that make it difficult to move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. Very often the advance or discovery that has been made is not at the stage where a potential investor can readily assess the value of the invention. What happens then is that the project is dropped or, if it is carried forward at this "half-baked" stage, the chances of commercial success are greatly diminished. Also, there are sad examples of provincial organizations (e.g. Ontario Research Foundation/ORTECH, now defunct) which ended up in competition with the private sector for R&D contracts.

As for the second part of the question, there are many commercialization models in Canada, Australia, the US and Europe from which one can glean valuable insights. Among them is a model which seems particularly well suited to overcome some of the problems that have been identified above.

Founded in 1999, Medical Research Council Technology (MRCT) is the technology transfer company of the UK's Medical Research Council and is responsible for commercialization of the Council's biomedical research. The success of this model is reflected in a report from the UK's National Audit Office released in February 2002 (Delivering the Commercialization of Public Sector Science) that singles out MRC for its innovative approach for accelerating the commercialization of research carried out in its laboratories.

Subsequently, a UK House of Commons science and technology report published in June 2006, commended "…the steps taken by MRC to actively exploit the research resulting from their investment and we urge Research Councils UK and the other Councils to follow the example of MRCT where appropriate."

time to act is now

If NRC is intent on introducing a new model to overcome existing barriers and accelerate commercializing of research results from its laboratories, this is the time to do it. Our political leaders are looking for solutions and will certainly respond to any proposals put forward that meet their objectives.

Under the visionary leadership of Dr Henry Friesen, disbanding of the Medical Research Council and legislation for the creation of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research took place in a remarkably short time. It should also be possible for NRC to introduce significant changes in the way it operates even if it requires revisions to the NRC Act.

By creating a separate commercialization entity, NRC would then be poised to play a more dominant role in the coordination of all federal government R&D activities (R$, November 13/08) were it given the mandate to do so.

Peter Morand is former dean of science and engineering at the Univ of Ottawa, past president of NSERC and past president & CEO of the Canadian Science & Technology Growth Fund petermorand@rogers.com

A more detailed outline of this proposal can be found on the RE$EARCH MONEY web site.