Port Colborne – The Canadian auto industry is undergoing a
radical change in approach to research and development, looking to companies to
ask researchers to tackle their issues.
Peter Frise, a professor at the University of Windsor, told
the Ontario Agri-Food Technologies meeting here recently that any industry,
including agriculture, could copy the new approach.
Frise said Canada has one of the best research and education
records in the world, but is poor at making money from the discoveries.
“Research is the process of putting money in and getting
knowledge, and we’re good at that,” he said.
“Commercialization is the process of putting knowledge in
and getting money out, and we suck at that,” Frise said.
Canada has a research-push system, he said, with researchers
deciding what they will research and asking governments for money. A lot of
that money is invested in buildings and equipment.
What other countries, such as Germany, do is put research to
work solving issues raised by companies, he said.
The radical new approach he’s helping to pioneer is the
Canadian Automotive Research Centre which will provide government money to
match what companies invest.
At least 25 per cent of the company investment must be cash,
he said. In return, they get to own all of the intellectual property rights.
Frise said universities have a terrible track record on
intellectual property rights, taking far too long to secure patents and not
knowing how to exploit their value.
He said the new approach for the auto industry is designed to be fast, flexible and
responsive to market opportunities.
The automotive research centre will be a “virtual centre,”
meaning it will have no physical assets, such as buildings and equipment, and
will involve professors and students from a number of universities.
We have enough of those, he said of Canada.
He said the average doctoral graduate is 30 years old and
has never worked in a company, yet we expect them to start innovating as soon
as they are hired.
The new approach will include opportunities for companies to
take a student for four to six months for $5,000 and use them to conduct
research.
It should be mutually beneficial, he said. The student
placements would be subsidized.
“This is a whole new way of doing things, and it works
because it has been tried in Germany and other places,” Frise said.
It's about time somebody had this kind of fresh idea to commercialize our Canadian research. And I've been at the University of Guelph on a fellowship to study biotechnology, and know that Frise is absolutely right about our Canadian system being based on research-push instead of company-pull and that the universities are abysmal at commercializing research findings and intellectual property rights.
There is, however, one good reason why governments are hesitant about this approach of company-led research - the history of the Scientific Research Tax Credit policy. Canadians responded with tremendous innovation at sucking mega-millions of cash out of Ottawa in return for phoo-phoo dust.
Only a small percentage of the scammers went to prison.
