Tag Archives: R & D

Good Nano Guide and the UK’s NHECD project complementary? plus the Finnish, the Canadians, nanotechnology and innovation

About a week and a half ago, I came across an announcement about a new nanoparticle toxicity project that’s being undertaken in the UK. The Nano health-environment commented database (NHECD) has had Euro 1.45 million allocated by the EU. From the announcement on the Azonano website,

The ultimate objective of NHECD is to develop an open access, robust and sustainable system that can meet the challenge of automatically maintaining a rich and up-to-date scientific research repository. This repository would enable a comprehensive analysis of published data on health and environment effects following exposure to nanoparticles, according to the project partners. The repository would also be harmonised to be compatible with existing databases at the metadata level.

It strikes me that this database project, which is in its very early stages, could be a very complementary to some of the work being done on the Good Nano Guide wiki (still in beta) which is being supported by the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON). I commented on my experience with the Good Nano Guide in my  Friday, July 10, 2009 posting.

Rob Annan on the Don’t leave Canada behind researcher forum posted a provocative commentary about Canada’s innovation gap on July 7, 2009 last week. The commentary was occasioned by an article in the Globe & Mail’s Report on Business (ROB) by Konrad Yakabuski here. The ROB (not to be confused with Annan) article, makes an excellent point about the importance of instability for stimulating innovation. From the ROB article,

The expression “necessity is the mother of invention” comes to mind. Though Finland’s history is full of rude awakenings, as it alternately succumbed to Swedish and Russian invaders in previous centuries, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was its biggest economic setback. The breakup of Finland’s biggest trading partner sparked a near depression in the nation of 5.3 million. Economic output shrank 13 per cent over three years and unemployment rose to 20 per cent from 3 per cent.

The crisis prompted much collective soul-searching, enabling the government to rally Finns behind the idea that the country’s revival lay in innovation. Government spending on R&D grew rapidly, even as overall public expenditures were slashed.

No company epitomized the transformation of the Finnish economy more than Nokia. The company (which takes its name from the river where its founders built a pulp mill in 1865) nearly went bankrupt in 1991. Its conglomerate strategy – making everything from telephone cables to car tires to TV sets, and selling them to consumers in the Nordic and Soviet-bloc countries – no longer proved viable. Backed by massive government research funding, Nokia dropped its other businesses to focus exclusively on making wireless communications devices, just as the global cellphone industry was poised to explode.

Today, Finland spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on R&D, compared with less than 2 per cent in Canada. In 2008, Nokia alone invested €6-billion ($9.8-billion) in R&D, or 12 per cent of its sales, including €2.3-billion in research and development spending at NSN, the unit that is buying Nortel’s key LTE assets and technology.

For a little more information about Canada’s R & D spending, you can check out my June 9, 2009 blog posting here. There’s more to the Finnish miracle (I did a little digging) which I will post about tomorrow. I’ll also be including some specifics about the nanotechnology situation both in Finland and in Canada.

Science and technology policy in Canada and I got my MA

I was having a chat with a physicist a few weeks ago about science policy and then , voila, I found an article about it in Backbone Magazine a week later. It’s called “The Research Race” and as you might expect, we do well in some things and not so well in others. The overall tone is alarmist.

According to the article even though Canada has gone from 15th to 13th place according to OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) statistics which measure performance based on investment in R & D (research and development) as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product) we have a problem. Of course, our ratio has remained flat and that must mean the reason we rose was because other countries had decreased their investment. In other words, our ranking rose despite our lack of added effort. The weird thing is that the writer doesn’t point this out explicitly when it would reinforce the points being made further on. (Aside: I’ve had this happen  when I’m writing about something new to me. It’s so easy to miss that sort of linking thought when you’re processing a lot of new information and trying to write it up under a deadline.)

The point being driven home is that we need a comprehensive strategy that supports science and technology with a view to commercialization. Let’s not forget, BackBone is distributed with the Globe and Mail and that newspaper’s main focus has always been business so the conclusion is no surprise. For details and charts, the article is here.

The article also notes that the federal government does have a strategy document called, “Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage.” The summary, pamphlet, and full report are here. I’ll be writing about that tomorrow.