Tag Archives: Hannah Hoag

What kind of science do we want? A few thoughts on the National Research Council of Canada and its new dedication to business

2 Replies

Last week in its May 7, 2013 news release, the National Research Council of Canada flung open the doors of its closet and declared itself ‘open for business’,

The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has transformed into an industry-focused research and technology organization. The refocused NRC will work with Canadian industries to bridge technology gaps, helping build a more innovative Canadian economy.

“NRC plays a pivotal role at the heart of Canada’s innovation system,” said the Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology). “The refocused NRC will provide Canadian industries with access to strategic research and development, technical services and specialized scientific infrastructure they need to succeed.”

“The Government’s top priority is jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for all Canadians,” said the Honourable Claude Carignan, Deputy Leader of the Government at the Senate. “By refocusing the NRC into a research and technology organization, our Government is ensuring that Canadian firms have the instruments and tools they need to become even more successful on the global stage.”

The refocused NRC will support Canadian industries by investing in large-scale research projects that are directed by and for Canadian business. It will also develop international networks to ensure timely access to primary research and will open the doors to world class scientific infrastructure, technical expertise and people.

“We are very excited about this change. Our organization is now easier for business to understand and access,” said John R. McDougall, President of the National Research Council. “We are committed to being a strong partner for innovation, and focused on achieving the concrete outcomes that will contribute to a stronger and more prosperous Canada. We will measure our success by the success of our clients.”

Research and technology organizations are mission-oriented providers of innovation services to firms and governments, dedicated to building economic competitiveness and, in doing so, improving quality of life. The refocused NRC will strengthen Canadian industry by encouraging more business investment to develop innovative products and services.

Response has ranged from mild interest to apoplexy and heartbreak.

Phil Plait, a US astronomer and creator of the Bad Astronomy blog/book/website, has opined in a May 13, 2013 posting at Slate.com (Note: A link has been removed),

This is not a joke. I wish it were.

John MacDougal [sic], President of the NRC, literally said, “Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value”. Gary Goodyear, the Canadian Minister of State for Science and Technology, also stated “There is [sic] only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge … second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit. Unfortunately, all too often the knowledge gained is opportunity lost.”

…

This is monumentally backwards thinking. That is not the reason we do science. Economic benefits are results of doing research, but should not be the reason we do it. Basic scientific research is a vast endeavor, and some of it will pay off economically, and some won’t. In almost every case, you cannot know in advance which will do which.

…

… If proposed and immediate economic benefits are the prime factors in choosing what science to fund, then the freedom of this human endeavor will be critically curtailed. It’s draining the passion and heart out of one of the best things we humans do.

This intensity suggests that Plait is unaware that the changeover has been taking place over a number of years. Hannah Hoag in an April 19, 2011 piece for Nature magazine noted this about the changeover which was even then taking place,

Canada’s largest research entity has a new focus — and some disaffected scientists. On 1 April [2011], the National Research Council (NRC), made up of more than 20 institutes and programmes with a total annual budget larger than Can$1 billion (US$1 billion), switched to a funding strategy that downplays basic research in favour of programmes designed to attract industry partners and generate revenue. [emphasis mine] Some researchers suggest that the shift is politically driven, because it brings the agency into philosophical alignment with the governing Conservative Party of Canada, which is in the middle of an election campaign.

The change was announced in a memo from NRC president John McDougall on 2 March [2011], and involves the transfer of authority over 20% of the agency’s research funds and the entire Can$60-million budget for large equipment and building costs to the NRC’s senior executive committee, which will direct it towards research with a focus on economic development, rather than pure science. Until now, individual institutes have had authority over research spending. McDougall wrote that in future, 80% of the research budget will be centralized, with “curiosity and exploratory activities” to be funded by the remaining 20%.

In Canada, most funding for academic researchers flows through agencies other than the NRC. [emphasis mine] However, with 4,700 scientists, guest researchers, technologists and support staff pursuing specialities from astrophysics to plant biotechnology at its institutes, the NRC plays a vital part in the nation’s scientific community, as a generator of original research and a service provider to government and industry.

While I’m no friend of the current Canadian government or John McDougall for that matter, this is an attempt to dealt with a longstanding issue, Canada’s failure with industrial research. From the Feb. 27, 2013 article, which prefigures the current discussion by a little over two months, by Tom Spears  in the Ottawa Citizen,

In October [2012], members of the House of Commons Industry Committee challenged McDougall to justify the changes.

Now McDougall has responded that Canada’s economy can’t wait for slow advances.

As science investment has grown in Canada, “our productivity and competitiveness, as measured by various organizations in the world, has been going in exactly the opposite direction,” he said in an interview.

“The primary reason for that is entirely speculative … But it would appear that Canada’s balance is quite different from other countries.”

That means we’re good at academic research, he says. We’re not so good at putting new knowledge to work.

“We’re not doing the things that take technology and ‘productize’ it.” (He makes exceptions to that: We’re strong in informational technology and in space-related industries such as robotics and building satellites.)

And he argues the answer lies in involving industry with the research from the start “rather than shoving it down their throat and hoping they’ll take it.”

For example, one new “flagship program” at NRC is to develop wheat that will resist cold and drought better than today’s, require less fertilizer, and produce greater yields.

“The timeline for this kind of thing is in the order of seven or eight years, which left to normal — I’ll call it traditional approaches — would typically be 20,” he said.

A similar ‘Canada is poor at commercializing research’ theme is mentioned in a May 7, 2013 article by Barrie McKenna and Ivan Semeniuk for the Globe and Mail,

The National Research Council, which gave the country canola and the atomic clock, will now be taking its scientific cues from Canadian industry as part of a makeover of the country’s flagship research labs.

The overhaul, quietly begun two years ago and formally unveiled Tuesday, means the 97-year-old NRC will focus on a clutch of large-scale, business-driven research projects at the expense of the basic science that was once at its core. The Conservative government says it wants to leverage the NRC’s world-class resources – everything from wind tunnels and ice tanks to high-powered microscopes – to help reverse the country’s chronically lagging innovation performance.

“Our businesses are not doing the research that they need to do,” Gary Goodyear, the minister of state for science and technology, told reporters in Ottawa. “So something had to be done.”

The move is in keeping with the Conservative government’s emphasis on a business model for public policy, such as tying foreign aid to economic development. It is also another significant foray into the science file, with critics saying the new approach is shortsighted and may shut the door on vast areas of promising fundamental research.

Mr. Goodyear insisted the government isn’t abandoning basic science, just shifting its focus to commercializing discoveries. “The day is past when a researcher could hit a home run simply by publishing a paper on some new discovery,” he said. “The home run is when somebody utilizes the knowledge that was discovered for social or economic gain.”

As part of the overhaul, the NRC is consolidating its disparate operations into a dozen business units and will focus on just five core areas of research: health costs, manufacturing, community infrastructure, security, and natural resources and the environment. Companies, or industries, will be able to tap the NRC’s expertise and labs, while sharing the cost of projects – as well as the intellectual property that results.

“Our job is to change innovation performance,” NRC president John McDougall explained in an interview. “So we have to do the things that will make that happen. Discovery science is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.”

Kennedy Stewart, the NDP (New Democratic Party; the official opposition) Member of Parliament expresses his opinion in his May 7, 2013 news release,

“Conservative incompetence meets Conservative narrow-mindedness,” said NDP Science and Technology critic Kennedy Stewart (Burnaby–Douglas). “They don’t want research driven by researchers themselves or public funding for science going towards actual scientific advancement. Their short-sighted approach will in fact hurt economic growth in the long run because it shuts the door on the long-view fundamental research that truly leads to scientific breakthroughs.”

Widespread dissatisfaction among the over 4,000 NRC employees and the change of focus away from basic research, patents and publications will increase the drain of Canada’s best and brightest minds to other OECD countries that are investing in scientific research heavily. Under the Conservatives, Canada just can’t compete.

“The government has been handing pink slips to scores of NRC scientists and researchers, lowering the organization’s research capacity and devastating internal morale,” said Stewart.  “It is hard to see how business will get scientific advice from the NRC if they fire all the scientists. Who they keep will spend their time trying to get off this runaway train.”

As best as I can unravel, there are several issues in the material I have excerpted:

  • what is the right mix of science, basic to applied/industrial?
  • it’s widely acknowledged that Canadians have done more poorly in the area of industrial science than colleagues in other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries
  • how do we address the issue?

The solution that the current Canadian government has arrived *at is impossible to assess at this point (although I have a guess as to the outcome) and something needed to be done with the National Research Council of Canada as noted in an April 7, 2010 posting on the Don’t leave Canada behind; Researcher Forum blog (I believe the writer was Rob Annan),

The NRC is a mess.

And the mess of the NRC neatly encapsulates much that’s wrong with Canadian science policy. No direction, no cohesion, multiple conflicting purposes.

Rob goes on to discuss the NRC’s mandate (Note: A link has been removed),

Well, the NRC is mandated, by the original NRC Act of 1916, “to undertaking, assisting or promoting scientific and industrial research in different fields of importance to Canada”. It did this very successfully into the 1960s, at which point, its greatest successes were carved out and handed to new organizations.

So what’s left? Well the NRC Act has a few specific mandates that the NRC fulfills: standards of measurement, manage observatories, investigate and standardize industrial materials, perform agricultural research, and maintain a national science library (which is under major financial stress, but let’s save that for another time). But the general mandate to “undertake, assist, or promote” scientific and industrial research is open to interpretation, and is a source of conflict.

I’m not sure if the NRC Act has been amended since 2010 to allow for these latest changes but Rob goes on to make, what is for me, a more interesting point (Note: A link has been removed),

But since the 1980s, the NRC has been without a strong sense of self. Is it a basic research organization or an applied research organization? Does it exist to perform independent, government-sponsored research, or does it provide research services in support of the private sector? Does it perform early-stage research and then partner with industry, or is it a fee-for-service research organization? The answer is yes.

The NRC is being pulled in too many directions.

What does our Minister of Industry [at the time, Tony Clement] have to say about the NRC?

NRC‘s aim is to bring timely solutions to market in areas of national importance: clean energy, health and wellness, and the environment. NRC will continue to partner with Canadian firms to deliver tangible, market-oriented results in high-impact and emerging industry sectors, such as the automotive sector.

But the NRC isn’t designed to do this – this is a different mandate than what is laid out in the Act. Which would be fine – maybe it’s time for a change – except that the NRC institutes have been, not surprisingly, built according to the mandate outlined in the NRC Act – as research laboratories, not product development laboratories or partnership incubators. And the people recruited to run these labs are scientists, not business-people. They want to do science, not chase down industrial partnerships in the automotive sector or take their clean energy products to market. They’ve been recruited for their scientific abilities; it’s a bit of a stretch to expect them also to be market innovators.

Furthermore, because the government does not fund the full cost of research at the institutes, these labs are dependent on research funding from external sources. If the funding was coming from Canadian business, then the vision of our Industry minister would be fulfilled. Unfortunately, Canadian business is notoriously averse to investing in academic or government research. So these labs are dependent on CIHR, NSERC, or private funding – mostly basic science funding. So, the government builds a system of research laboratories, forces them into dependence on basic science funding, and then complains that there isn’t enough market-driven research going on? [all emphases mine]

I realize that CIHR and NSERC funding programs have changed but the issue with Canadian business paying for research has not. It is, as I have noted in other pieces, a cultural issue with the key question being, How do you inculcate a business culture that innovates? What we have now is a ‘start-up’ culture where people found businesses based on exciting research and plan on growing those businesses to a point where they can be sold to larger companies from the US or Britain or elsewhere. Based on these comments, my guess is that the current changes to the NRC will not result in the ‘innovation’ the government has repeatedly stated is its primary goal since our basic business culture will remain untouched. One last thing, I think people are going to figure out how to game this new NRC.

*at added on May 22, 2013

Report on Review of Federal Support to R&D

1 Reply

It (Innovation Canada: A Call to Action) [ETA Oct. 25, 2011: Title corrected] is not a light read (it weighs in at 148 pp.) as one might expect when a comprehensive review of government programmes is made and given the pace that major reports are being released these days I’ve not had a chance to even skim through the report itself. However, there are some major recommendations being made, notably this one about the National Research Council (from the Review of Federal Support to R&D home page),

  • Transform the institutes of the National Research Council [NRC] into a series of large-scale, collaborative centres involving business, universities and the provinces.
  • The NRC was created during World War I to kick-start Canada’s research capacity. It has a long and storied history of discoveries and innovation, including numerous commercial spin-offs. While the NRC continues to do good work, research and commercialization activity in Canada has grown immensely.  In this new context, the NRC can play a unique role, linking its large-scale, long-term research activity with the academic and business communities. The panel recommends evolving NRC institutes, consistent with the current strategic direction, into not-for-profit centres run with stakeholders, and incorporating its public policy research into other departments.

The panel also suggests cutting down on the number of funding agencies and creating a portal or ‘concierge’ to help businesses find the right funding solution for their needs,

  • The creation of an Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC) to deliver the federal government’s business innovation programs.
    • There are currently more than 60 programs across 17 different government departments. The creation of an arm’s-length funding and delivery agency – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council – would begin to streamline the process as the development of a common application portal and service to help businesses find the right programs for their needs (a “concierge”).

This next one seems more like a ‘buy Canada’ recommendation than anything else,

  • Make business innovation one of the core objectives of procurement.
    • The federal government spends billions of dollars every year but it ranks low internationally when it comes to using that purchasing power to encourage Canadian innovation. The encouragement of home-grown innovation a part of government procurement is commonsense.

I like this idea,

  • Help high-growth innovative firms access the risk capital they need through the Business Development Bank of Canada
    • Innovative Canadian companies face real challenges in getting start-up funding and late stage risk capital financing. In many cases, the gap is filled by foreign investors, which means that too many commercial benefits and intellectual property end up leaving the country. Directing the BDC to work with angel investor groups and develop late-stage risk capital/growth equity funds will pay dividends.

Simplifying certainly seems reasonable,

 ·Simplification of the tax credit system used to support small and medium-sized businesses.

  • The current Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program is unnecessarily complicated: many small businesses hire consultants just to submit an application. This discourages eligible businesses from applying and may cost successful small SR&ED recipients a good portion of the credit received. By basing the SR&ED credit  solely on labour costs, the panel believes SR&ED will be more effective.

This one seems like one of those recommendations that are impossible to implement,

·Establish a clear federal voice for innovation and work with the provinces to improve coordination.

  • Currently, there is a lack of government-wide clarity when it comes to innovation. Responsibility is spread across a number of cabinet portfolios. The Prime Minister should assign responsibility for innovation to a single minister, supported by a whole-of-government Innovation Advisory Committee, evolved from the current Science Technology and Innovation Council (STIC), composed of external stakeholders, who would then work with the provincial and territorial governments to initiate a collaborative dialogue to improve coordination and impact.

I base my comment about the last recommendation on my experience with the gnashing of teeth I’ve observed when someone is going to lose an area of responsibility that is associated with power and other good things. Who do you imagine will want to give up innovation and what will they want in return?  Another question which springs to mind is this one: How are they going to develop a single voice for discussion of innovation across several federal bureaucracies with thousands of people and miles between them when even a small office of 20 people experiences difficulty doing this (again, this is based on my personal experience).

As for the suggested changes to the NRC? Well, those should provide some fodder for lively discussion. I’m sure the other items will provide conversational fodder too but it seems to me that the two I’ve highlighted in these comments are likely to be the among the most contentious.

Hannah Hoag in her Oct. 14, 2011 posting on the Nature news blog notes this,

  In an effort to address Canada’s problem with innovation, an independent panel has recommended a radical overhaul that includes the creation of a new funding council and transforms the country’s largest research entity, the billion dollar National Research Council (NRC).

Study after study has shown that Canada’s businesses invest less on R&D, relative to the country’s gross domestic product, than those of many other OECD countries and, unlike others, has actually decreased its spending over the last decade. Many of these business investments include government support in the form tax credits, training programs, or grants. [emphasis mine]

In an effort to make the best use of the government’s investments the six-member expertpanel developed six broad recommendations include appointing a Minister of Innovation and creating the Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC).

Laura Payton writes in her Oct. 17, 2011 article for CBC news,

Canada’s research and development funding system is too complicated and confusing, a government-appointed panel [for the Review of Federal Support to R&D] said Monday.

Creating a new arm’s-length funding agency and putting a single cabinet minister in charge of innovation would streamline the application process and give the government a clear voice on the issue, Tom Jenkins, the panel’s chair said.

The idea is to cut red tape and make it easier for companies to get access to cash and increase collaboration.

“Going forward, more of the world’s innovations may well happen elsewhere, outside of Canada,” warned Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text Corp.

“Governments in Canada spend more on supporting business R&D per capita than most countries in the industrialized world. And yet, we’re increasingly near the bottom of the pack when it comes to investing in business innovation. So if it’s not a lack of government investment, then why has our business R&D momentum been stalled for almost a decade?”

Gary Goodyear, minister of state for science and technology, said business investment and R&D help create high-paying, high-value jobs and maintain Canada’s standard of living.

Of course, none of the recommendations in the report from the expert panel address the core problem of Canadian businesses not investing in themselves. It simply wasn’t part of the brief and the title seems a little grandiose. Perhaps Government funding for innovation in Canada: A Call to Action might have been a better title.

While I think this review was an excellent exercise I am dismayed that one of the core problems (business investment) with innovation in Canada has not been addressed.

  • Help high-growth innovative firms access the risk capital they need through the Business Development Bank of Canada
    • Innovative Canadian companies face real challenges in getting start-up funding and late stage risk capital financing. In many cases, the gap is filled by foreign investors, which means that too many commercial benefits and intellectual property end up leaving the country. Directing the BDC to work with angel investor groups and develop late-stage risk capital/growth equity funds will pay dividends.

Innovation = more $$$ for business schools?

Leave a reply

I’m trying to calm down but really!!!! Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto gave the Globe & Mail an interview last week where he opined that Canadian business schools are not getting enough money which is, in turn, affecting innovation. I hope the interview is a form of performance art rather than a reflection of Martin’s thought processes.

(Please accept my apologies but I’m having trouble with my links today so I will have to give you the URLs.) From the March 16, 2011 article Canada will shrivel under business-school neglect, dean says (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/managing/business-education/canada-will-shrivel-under-business-school-neglect-dean-says/article1942997/page1/) by Gordon Pitts,

What makes a country prosperous is not investment in science and technology. [emphasis mine] It is businesses producing high paying jobs by having unique products and processes that a customer needs. Yet we have an economic development policy that focuses incredibly tightly on a very narrow part of the economy with no demonstration or proof that it is particularly helpful. Meanwhile, we complain about our companies not being innovative enough or globally competitive enough, and we send them off to battle with much less education than their competitors.

We hear people say, ‘Well, what we need are scientists and engineers running these companies because these are tech companies.’ But if we in Canada would like to have companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco and Intel, find out how many of their CEOs have science and tech degrees. The answer is there are a lot more MBAs than science and technology degrees.

All of the companies cited were founded by people with science and technology degrees as Nassif Ghoussoub in A business dean’s rant: Ignorance of the facts or pure “Chutzpah”? (http://ghoussoub.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/a-business-dean%E2%80%99s-rant-willful-ignorance-or-pure-%E2%80%9Cchutzpah%E2%80%9D/#more-3241), and James Colliander, Rotman Dean to Government: Give the Basic Research Funding to Business Schools not Scientists (http://blog.math.toronto.edu/colliand/2011/03/17/rotman-dean-wants-the-money-targeted-for-science-research-2/) note.

Martin never does explain how more business education money will actually translate into more innovation in Canada. In fact, he never explains how it has worked anywhere else. Strangely, he does not mention the latest economic meltdown due to business practices. If more education and research benefited business and the economy so much then why the meltdown that our US neighbours to the south have experienced so strongly? By Martin’s reckoning the US economy should be in much better condition than it is what with all that money going to support business students.

I was a little curious as to Martin’s own background and found this in an Aug. 1, 2006 article by Robert Berner for Bloomberg Business Week (from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_31/b3945417.htm_),

A Canadian native and graduate of Harvard Business School, the 48-year-old Martin left a position as co-head of a consulting firm to take the Rotman post. He’s working with Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design, and David Kelley, co-founder of design consultancy IDEO and head of the new Stanford Design School, to create a new design-based curriculum that can be used in business schools. Martin practices what he preaches: He advises Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) chief A.G. Lafley, among other chief executives.

So let me get this. The dean of a business school whose own educational background appears to be largely business (according to the Wikipedia essay about him [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Martin], he has a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard College in addition to his MBA from Harvard Business School) and who worked as a management consultant prior to becoming a dean thinks that Canadians need more business education. What’s that old saying? If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

As for the statistics he offers about the amount of research money going to business (from the Pitts article),

For example, of federal research money from the three major funding councils, business gets 1.7 per cent of the funding but it gets 17 per cent of the students. Health Sciences have 36 per cent of funding and 11.2 per cent of students – and that’s understandable with all that expensive R&D. Natural sciences and engineering have 39 per cent of funding and 28 per cent of students.

In all the social sciences and humanities, except business, there are 44 per cent of students and 24 per cent of research funding. So the social sciences get hit, but their hit is less than 2 to 1. In business – which is all about making our country competitive – it’s a 10 to one cut.

It does seem a pretty pitiful amount of research money is going to business research (Note: I would like to know how Martin has derived his statistics). Mind you a fair amount of the material produced by Statistics Canada is used for business research purposes while a lot of the quantitative social science research has to be gathered by the social scientists themselves. And, Nassif points out that a big chunk of the 2009 budget research money going for  social sciences and humanities research was in fact intended for business studies.

… we should not forget that, as recently as 2009, business schools got a preferential treatment from the federal government. Indeed, after having cut the Tri-council by 5%, the 2009 stimulus federal budget proceeded to earmark the $17.5-million assigned to SSHRC for graduate scholarships towards students in business and finance.

Business is making inroads in many areas not just in social sciences and humanities funding. A March 20, 2011 article by Tom Spears for the Ottawa Citizen indicates that business and economic interests will be driving research in this country in a way that should warm Martin’s heart (from http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/boss+orders+scientists+focus+market+drivers/4472949/story.html),

There’s radical change at the National Research Council, Canada’s biggest science institute, as the new president orders all staff to direct research toward boosting economic development and technology, with less time for pure science.

Starting this spring, 20 per cent of research money, and all the capital funds that buy expensive lab equipment, will be removed from existing budgets and directed where the president and vice-presidents choose.

Eventually, 80 per cent of research funds will be redirected this way.

NRC president John McDougall has announced to all staff that he wants research that is “successfully deployed and used to benefit our customers and partners in industry and government.”

His memo, dated March 2, warns that “history is an anchor that ties us to the past rather than a sail that catches the wind to power us forward.” [emphasis mine]

The new system, with most funding awarded by top management, will put existing staff in a position of having to apply to their employer to keep doing their own work. So far, they aren’t faring well: McDougall notes that his scientists have suggested more than 70 research areas. But most of these have no clear “market driver” or “purposeful direction,” he writes.

If business education is in as much trouble as Martin suggests, I’d like to see data that supports his thesis rather than a lot of numbers being thrown about and what amounts to performance art for the Globe and Mail.

By the way, Tom Jenkins, the head of the expert panel that convened the public consultation on innovation (it’s correct title is: A Review of Federal Support to Research and Development), is the Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer for Open Text. From the Open Text webpage about the Board of Directors (http://www.opentext.com/2/global/company/company-directors.htm),

Mr. Jenkins is Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer for OpenText. From 1994 to 2005, Mr.Jenkins was President, then Chief Executive Officer and then from 2005 to present, Chief Strategy Officer of OpenText. Mr. Jenkins has served as a Director of OpenText since 1994 and as its Chairman since 1998. In addition to his OpenText responsibilities, Mr.Jenkins is the Chair of the federal centre of excellence Canadian Digital Media Network (CDMN). He is also an appointed member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), past appointed member of the Government of Canada’s Competition Policy Review Panel and past appointed member of the Province of Ontario’s Ontario Commercialization Network Review Committee (OCN). Mr.Jenkins is also a member of the board of BMC Software, Inc. a software corporation based in Houston, Texas. He is also a member of the University of Waterloo Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council, GRAND, the federal research centre of excellence for digital media, a director of the C.D. Howe Institute, a director of the Canadian International Council (CIC) and a director of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE). Mr.Jenkins received an M.B.A. in entrepreneurship & technology management from Schulich School of Business at York University, an M.A.Sc. in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto and a B.Eng.& Mgt. in Engineering Physics and Commerce from McMaster University. [emphases mine]

I gather Mr. Jenkins decided on an education that spans both engineering and business.  Perhaps innovation is better served by multidisciplinary interests over the single-minded pursuit of more money for the Rotman School of Management.

ETA April 20, 2011: Nature has weighed in about John McDougall and his National Research Council directives (from the April 19, 2011 news article by Hannah Hoag),

Canada’s largest research entity has a new focus — and some disaffected scientists. On 1 April, the National Research Council (NRC), made up of more than 20 institutes and programmes with a total annual budget larger than Can$1 billion (US$1 billion), switched to a funding strategy that downplays basic research in favour of programmes designed to attract industry partners and generate revenue. Some researchers suggest that the shift is politically driven, because it brings the agency into philosophical alignment with the governing Conservative Party of Canada, which is in the middle of an election campaign.

…

Tom Brzustowski, who studies commercialization of innovation at the University of Ottawa, says that the adjustment to the NRC’s focus will support areas that have been weak. “By focusing on the flagship programmes there is still room to do the whole spectrum of research. It’s a good strategic move,” he says.

But the news has rekindled anxiety over how Canada’s government has been directing science funding — criticisms that have grown sharper as the federal election on 2 May [2011] approaches.