:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. My name is Dan Wayner. I am vice-president for emerging technologies at the National Research Council of Canada. I have with me Dr. Duncan Stewart who is our general manager of the NRC's security and disruptive technologies portfolio. I am pleased to be here on behalf of NRC to talk about disruptive technologies today.
NRC is Canada’s research and technology organization. RTOs, as we call them, are market-driven organizations whose primary job is to develop and deploy technology. In a way, we act as a link in the innovation system by stimulating business investment in R and D, adding value to research investments, reducing risks, and in many cases developing market-focused technologies in our research facilities across Canada.
[Translation]
The NRC has more than 2,000 employees working in research and development. They are experts in a multitude of scientific and technical fields and they are equipped to respond to the current and future needs of Canadian industry. The NRC is able to quickly put together multidisciplinary teams to help people in industry to overcome any difficulties they are facing. These may be in meeting urgent short-term needs or in establishing basic knowledge and technology that will allow them to tackle new markets.
[English]
NRC has a track record in advancing and delivering technology solutions in collaboration with Canadian industry. Some of the examples include flying the world’s first civil jet flight powered by 100% biofuel; pioneering the Internet in Canada; launching the world’s first national optical R and D network; inventing 3-D laser scanning technologies that are now used extensively by the film industry; medical breakthroughs, including an infant meningitis vaccine, the world’s first cardiac pacemaker, and the first medical isotopes for use in nuclear medicine; and inventing the fastest lasers in the world with light pulses now approaching a billionth of a billionth of a second.
[Translation]
As Vice-President of Emerging Technologies, I have as one of my duties to make sure that the NRC's long-term investments in science and technology are focused on the technological issues that may threaten or stimulate Canada's economy or improve the lives of Canadians in the next two decades.
In order to do that, we are implementing and supporting certain capabilities, by which I mean expertise and research and development platforms in various fields, such as high-volume data analytics, quantum technologies, optical technologies and nanotechnologies, to mention but a few.
[English]
The term disruptive technology typically refers to a technology that creates a profound, discontinuous change or quantum jump in capability or cost performance. It is important to understand the impacts are economic and social, affecting how we live, work, and communicate. We are really talking about disruptive innovations. I want to introduce that term. The technology in itself is not disruptive until it is deployed into the marketplace and used.
There are many examples from the past of how technologies or combinations of technologies have driven disruptions. The discovery of the double helix in the early 1950s was transformational for science, but not disruptive. However, combined with rapid DNA sequencing, proteomics, and big data, we find ourselves in the early days of personalized medicine, which we believe will be disruptive. The transistor led to the demise of the vacuum tube industry, which might be considered a disruption for that industry, but combined with the laser, fibre optic data transmission, data analytics, and business innovation, we have e-retail. E-retail is truly a disruption in economies today. In the more recent past we could look at smartphones, a Canadian invention, as an example of a technology that has had a huge economic impact and has driven societal changes.
The idea of a disruptive technology or innovation is not about the technology itself, but about the impact it has on our lives. Will the self-driven car be a disruptive innovation? Maybe, but we won't know until it's developed and deployed and we actually see the impact it will have on the way we work and live.
[Translation]
What will Canada need to continue its influence in the development and deployment of the so-called “disruptive”, that is to say revolutionary, innovations of the future? Identifying the innovations that will get to the finish line is difficult, but choosing the right race to enter is even more so.
When we know that we are in the right race, it will be easier to establish which technological platforms we really have to have in order to clear the track for those innovations.
[English]
I want to focus on a key ingredient. We're here in part to talk about what it is going to take for Canada to be competitive in the development of potentially disruptive technology, and the key ingredient for me is collaboration.
A well-organized innovation system can be like a professional hockey team. There are a number of players on the innovation landscape, universities, RTOs like NRC or CNL, for example, and others at the provincial level, all of whom have a role to play. The goalies don’t try to score goals, the right wingers don’t try to do the left wingers' jobs, but we do back each other up when it's needed. In the absence of collaboration, the innovation system feels like kids’ hockey, if I could use that analogy; that is, we all chase the puck and we end up competing with each other instead of organizing ourselves to win the game.
There are, in fact, examples of collaboration excellence in Canada focused on disruptive innovation. I'll refer to just one, and that is the quantum computing public-private partnership, which is really centred in Waterloo. It's a tremendous example of technology being driven by a vision of the future. In my view, collaboration between universities, RTOs such as NRC, and industry is the key success factor. In one direction, emerging science can lead to new technologies that have the potential to address market opportunities, but looking in the other direction, industry knows where the market opportunities actually are and has the opportunity to influence the direction of S and T.
RTOs like NRC have the capability to be the link, taking emerging science ideas and integrating them into new technology prototypes and processes. When it works well, it's a virtuous circle with industry motivating scientists to address key knowledge and technology gaps, and scientists working with industry to integrate emerging technologies into their products and processes, thus giving them the competitive edge in a global market.
As an RTO, how is NRC supporting Canadian industry to develop disruptive technologies? The NRC's printable electronics program is a good example of an initiative to foster a new industry ecosystem for Canada. Printable electronics is an emerging, advanced manufacturing technology, really part of an additive manufacturing family that's enabling lower cost digital fabrication of electronic devices. It has the potential to be a key component to enable potentially disruptive innovations such as the Internet of things.
The program is integrated into an industry-driven printable electronics consortium that was launched in 2012 and has company members from across the entire value chain. The consortium sets the R and D priorities, and NRC carries out R and D in collaboration with the industry partners on technology demonstrations that de-risk the advancement and deployment of the technologies. The goal is to catalyze a globally competitive pivotal electronic sector in Canada. To date, 11 technologies have been developed in collaboration with NRC that have been transferred to Canadian industry to commercialize PE products.
One of our licensees, Raymor Industries from Boisbriand, Quebec, won the award for the world’s best new material at the IDTechEx USA 2014 conference, which is the world’s largest printed electronics conference and trade show. The material, now marketed by Raymor, is the highest purity semiconducting nanotube ink to be commercially available today, a potentially disruptive innovation for the flexible electronics industry.
Another example comes from the National Institute for Nanotechnology, a collaboration between NRC and the University of Alberta. We have collaborated together for some years, working at the cutting edge of nanotechnology. One of these collaborations has led to the creation of a new company, QSi, to develop and commercialize a fundamentally new approach to atomic-scale, ultra-low-power computing circuits and devices that are faster than existing devices while consuming orders of magnitude less power. NRC’s role was to take a concept developed at the laboratory and demonstrate the possibility of being able to scale this up into a manufacturing process, a critical milestone to attract investors.
In closing, I'd like to reiterate that Canada is well positioned to be a major player in the development and deployment of potentially disruptive technologies. Collaboration across the innovation landscape is key, bringing together universities, RTOs such as NRC, and industry to ensure that we have a robust innovation pipeline focused on Canadian and global opportunities.
Thank you very much.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your warm welcome. Thank you, members of the committee, for your invitation to speak here today.
[Translation]
I am very pleased to be here to present information in support of the committee’s recently launched study on the state of disruptive technologies in Canada. This is certainly an important subject worthy of serious study.
[English]
In the time I have been allotted I wish to talk more about how NSERC perceives and defines disruptive technologies. I would also like to discuss the role NSERC plays as Canada’s largest investor in discovery research and as an enabler of partnerships with industry that ultimately contribute to the development of enabling disruptive technologies.
When it comes to defining disruptive technologies I think the committee received an excellent primer earlier this week with the presentation by Industry Canada, and my colleague, Danial, of course, has also done a good job of that.
[Translation]
I had the opportunity to review this material prior to my appearance before you today and, as was pointed out, a single, standard definition of disruptive technology is lacking. Whether it’s McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, MIT or others, there was no consensus on those technologies that would be the most disruptive.
But, looking at the list, I did see several common areas that, because of the breadth of research that NSERC invests in, we are very familiar with.
[English]
For example, we support the technologies that relate to how we access, manipulate, and represent information, such as secure computing; technologies that relate to how we power the world, such as new battery technologies, and new renewable sources of energy, for example solar cells that are capable of capturing the full spectrum and energy of sunlight; and technologies that relate to how we build the world, such as advanced materials, including nanomaterials which, again, you've heard about earlier today, additive manufacturing, and 3-D printing.
At NSERC we view disruptive technologies more as the application of the discoveries that have a transformative impact, and less on making guesses about which technology will trade or how the business is done.
NSERC has a major role to play in this process. To begin with, disruptive technologies start from a foundation of discovery research. By discovery research I’m referring to research generally taking place in a non-industry setting and focused on a question or problem that has interest from a purely scientific perspective. It is discovery because the knowledge created is literally a world first
What makes the findings from this work disruptive is when someone else looks at this information in the context of a problem they are trying to solve with a possible application in mind. Context is everything and suddenly there is a new and potentially better way of doing something.
If we think about 3-D printing, this came out of fundamental work on photocurable liquid polymers. In other words, being able to use light to harden plastics. The innovation was to develop a better way to apply computer control to draw 3-D parts, layer by layer. One of the key reasons we see so much attention to 3-D printing at the present time is that the basic patents have expired, meaning that we are seeing lots of lower-cost competitors entering the market.
To get back to NSERC, our vision is to help make Canada a country of discoverers and innovators for the benefit of all Canadians.
[Translation]
NSERC funding fuels 11,300 professors working across numerous fields. This is an incredibly productive, inventive and world-class workforce that consistently delivers discoveries. Our president, Dr. Mario Pinto, calls this Canada’s brain trust.
If we look back to some of the areas labelled as disruptive, such as new manufacturing technologies, discovery investments by NSERC are clearly in the picture.
For example, if we examine data from our discovery funding program for the past 10 years, the program that supports purely curiosity-driven research, we invested in approximately $425 million in manufacturing-related nanotechnology research programs by Canadian researchers.
[English]
We invest in programs to drive innovation. We are helping industry to use these world firsts in knowledge to drive R and D and to create new firsts in the marketplace. By doing this, NSERC plays a key role in adding value to knowledge and reducing the overall risks of innovation. It’s a very client-driven approach that has led to over 3,000 partnerships between industry and the research sector annually. With these partnerships, we are creating the time and space to establish the context that I mentioned earlier.
If the catchphrase for discovery is “eureka” then perhaps a corresponding name for invention is “I hadn’t thought of that before.”
As I conclude my remarks, let me say thank you again to the committee for the opportunity to present this information. I look forward to your questions.
[Translation]
Thank you.
:
Good morning, Mr. Chair, and thank you.
[English]
On behalf of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, I want to thank you and the committee members for the opportunity to appear before you today with respect to additive manufacturing and other disruptive technologies.
[Translation]
At SSHRC, we recognize the enormous potential that these fields possess in terms of stimulating the Canadian economy.
[English]
lt goes without saying that they create jobs and exports. When I think in terms of using 3-D printers to create custom-fit hip replacements, it's clear they can also improve Canadians' quality of life. At the same time, the rapid development of technologies like 3-D printing and robotics is generating the need for a better understanding of the economic, social, environmental, and legal implications of their adoption and use. More importantly, it can be argued that their very adoption depends on these implications. We know very well that early adopters generally have the competitive edge, but the flip side is that early adopters also face great uncertainty and risk, and their apparent advantages can be short-lived.
[Translation]
Societies adapt to rapid technological change best by understanding its impacts, capabilities and complexities. Social scientists and humanities scholars are uniquely positioned to address these issues with made-in-Canada solutions.
[English]
By that, I mean they bring critical and creative thinking to complex issues such as disruptive technologies. At SSHRC we understand that government, industry, and academia must work together to advance disruptive technology but also to embrace its enormous potential. With the launch of its renewed partnerships funding opportunities, SSHRC has reinforced its commitment to the power of all types of collaborations—multi-sector, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional—to bring intellectual, cultural, social and economic benefits to Canada and to the world.
[Translation]
In our 2013-2016 strategic plan, SSHRC has identified multi-sector partnerships as an area where potential exists for improved and enhanced participation, development and sharing of best practices, and communication of results and impacts among a variety of stakeholders.
[English]
Multi-sector partnerships engage the users of research in the design and implementation of research projects at the start, thereby increasing the potential for that research to contribute directly to innovation in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.
For example, take Aaron Sprecher, assistant professor at the school of architecture at McGill University and recipient of a SSHRC partnership development grant. Dr. Sprecher's laboratory for integrated prototyping and hybrid environments is helping to change the ways architects design, collaborate, and build. Working with an interdisciplinary team, as well as with external partners and companies, his work is advancing innovation in design, optimization process, the performance of materials, and fabrication. lt is a game-changing initiative with the end user in mind. Moreover, SSHRC-funded graduate students, whose research includes 3-D printing and additive manufacturing, are aligned with interdisciplinary practices in architecture, fine arts, and historical studies.
[Translation]
For example, François Leblanc is a doctoral candidate funded by SSHRC. He is exploring how 3D printing facilitates the design and production of complex and optimized structures that were inconceivable not too long ago. He is also looking at how this technology effectively optimizes the amount of material used in construction with a precise distribution of materials.
[English]
SSHRC's partnership with Mitacs will also continue to support the development of talent through support for internships for social science and humanities graduate students with both industry and community organizations. Further opportunities to provide training opportunities for students with industry involved with additive manufacturing can be explored to help Canadian businesses become more innovative, competitive, and productive.
[Translation]
At SSHRC, we recognize that dynamic new technologies are enabling, accelerating and influencing deep conceptual changes in the research environment, the economy and society.
[English]
As such, in collaboration with NSERC, CIHR, as well as with CFI, Genome Canada, and NRC, SSHRC has also been leading the creation of a new policy framework to address digital infrastructure challenges. The policy, which is being developed with the extensive engagement of multi-sector stakeholders, will enable best practices to manage and to grow the digital ecosystem required to meet 21st-century research needs, and thus contribute to Canada's social and economic prosperity.
In the absence of a standard definition, disruptive technology may perhaps be best described as lying at the intersection of various fields of research. In this regard, SSHRC will continue to explore opportunities to continue its efforts, and to coordinate its efforts, with federal agency partners as well as with the research community, industry, and organizations to create an enabling environment that advances research and the development of talent in this area.
[Translation]
I might add that these efforts are particularly well aligned with SSHRC's Imagining Canada's Future initiative, through which we are seeking to advance the contributions of the social sciences and humanities to future societal challenges and opportunities.
[English]
Following a comprehensive two-year exercise, six future challenge areas have been identified for Canada in an evolving global context that is likely to emerge in the next five, 10, 15, or 20 years.
The issue of leveraging digital technologies for the benefit of Canadians is one of those important challenges for SSHRC. This includes the need to understand the opportunities and risks associated with the adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies, as well as the need for effective training and tools that would maximize their utilization and enable equitable access to them.
In fact, emerging technology and how best to take advantage of it is the subject of a knowledge synthesis grant opportunity that SSHRC will be launching this fall. This funding opportunity will help our state of knowledge about emerging technology, as well as identify gaps in our knowledge and the most promising policies and practices related to it. More than ever Canada needs social scientists and humanists to focus on these matters.
In closing, a key point I want to emphasize is that in and of itself technology—disruptive or otherwise—is largely neutral. At the end of the day, innovation is a human endeavour. Technology is critical, but what makes it sing are the value-added elements that largely come from the research we fund at SSHRC—design, business planning, marketing, content, and training. To this end, SSHRC is focusing its efforts to encourage and promote research, talent development, and the mobilization of knowledge in this area, and we will be closely monitoring and assessing research capacity and the range of insights that are being developed across all our funding opportunities.
[Translation]
Thank you for this opportunity to discuss what SSHRC and its research community can bring to this important issue.
[English]
I'd be happy to answer questions you may have.
Thank you very much.
:
That's actually a really interesting question. I'm going to take the risk of generalizing my answer because to me it's really fundamental to understanding that inventions lag the innovations sometimes by decades. The double helix was actually discovered in 1953. It was 75 years before we actually pulled together the knowledge that we gained from that information into industries that I think will revolutionize health care in the coming decades.
As I said, I'm not deeply knowledgeable about what happened in the fifties around the nuclear industry, but we see the same issue with the transistor, which was first discovered in the forties. The solid-state revolution, as we called it, was actually in the sixties, 20 years later. The creation of the first computers, the first XT computer landed on my desk in the early eighties.
So there is a lag, and the lag really depends on the types of technology, but there's also the issue that in fact it isn't one invention, it's actually the bringing together of many inventions that lead to new innovations. As I mentioned before in terms of the disruption of e-retail, it comes from the transistor, from the laser, from optical telecom, from analytics. There are a number of advances in our knowledge that have come together.
I wanted to address what you were asking about in terms of skilling, because it is true that in many cases disruptions lead to significant economic changes, which require a re-skilling of our workforce. I was having a conversation with one of my provincial colleagues recently where I asked the question, “What are we doing right now about the likelihood that in 20 or 30 years factories may not employ very many people, or if they do they won't clearly have the same skills that people have today who are working?” I think we need to get ahead of that. I think we need to not just think about invention and technologies leading to innovations, but in fact we should be thinking holistically about what we are doing about re-skilling our workforces. What are the types of skills they'll need?
I won't go on too much longer, but only to say there's always a lag between invention and innovation. If the innovations are truly disruptive, it often means that in fact we need a re-skilled workforce in order to really take advantage of it.
:
Well, thank you very much. It's a very fascinating question and one that I think had policy-makers in Canada and around the world asking similar questions.
In specific response to the level of research that is being funded in universities, I think within universities it's somewhat difficult to make a clean distinction of what is basic and what is applied. I believe earlier in the week when you heard from Industry Canada, it did make mention of the fact that although our business expenditures in research and development are not at the top of the list, if you like, our investments in higher education research and development are among the top, certainly in the G-7, as we call it now.
I think a very good example of the results of that and of where Canada stands in the world was a study released two years ago by the Council of Canadian Academies, called “The State of Science & Technology in Canada”. In that, they outlined fields where Canada is respected internationally, for example, in the publication of journals and their citations, the groundbreaking work. They came up and pretty much reinforced the message that Canada certainly does have some of the top research minds.
The concept that our president likes to point to is that it's not the individual researcher working at the University of Toronto, or UBC, but rather it's looking at it from the context of those 11,000 who have been doing this work over decades, and not just in Canada but collaborating internationally. I think that is a really key ingredient for moving forward.
In much of the research that NRC has referred to, it's quite often the researchers at NRC who have either been funded by NSERC in their academic careers or have collaborated with universities. It's a combination of things.
:
I would say that you've really hit the core of the issue for Canada, nevertheless; and I think it's an issue that's been bedevilling not just this government but governments going back for several decades.
Also, as I'm sure this committee can appreciate, the nature of the Canadian economy has a lot to do with the level of research, development, and innovation. When we look at our exports and their trade, we do have a very strong resource-based economy that traditionally, in its own right, is not considered to be a performer of research and development. However, it is an adopter—in fact, a very sophisticated adopter—of information technologies, for example.
But I think, really, what you're getting at is something we consider to be an ongoing struggle, and that is connecting the two worlds closer together. Much of that can be done through the partnerships. At NSERC, for example, we have developed a number of programs that are not just pushing the technologies out to say that there's something really cool here that people in industry should be looking at, but having discussions with them about what their issues are, and exposing them to knowledge and connections where they could get the information and turn that into something much more effective.
But that comes in a whole ecosystem of other things. For example, people in the NRC's IRAP, the industrial research assistance program, will be working constantly with the small and medium-sized enterprises, in particular, to help them get to that point.
Our job at NSERC is on the funding side to ensure that, on the one hand, we have a very rich, diverse, and high-quality research base, and on the other, it is connected.
I would just simply agree with much of what's been said. From the perspective of SSHRC and the social sciences and humanities, we tend to see the basic versus applied issue as more of a continuum. People do work that may be seen as very basic but then it leads to applications through others and the work of others. Some people do work that spans the entire spectrum.
We've designed our programs in such a way as to allow for individuals to seek funding at both ends of the spectrum and in between, whether that's through our insight grant program, more on the basic side, or through partnerships, more on the applied side.
One of the things I would add, though, just in terms of your question about innovation and impact, is that particularly in our disciplines it's very difficult sometimes to show what that impact is. In terms of work, for example, that may lead to policy change, that then becomes incorporated, and that then is taken advantage of within industry. It's quite often difficult to understand precisely what the pathways were. Personally, I would advocate for a bit more forensic investigation, in terms of working back.
I can give you a brief example of a disruptive technology that has a profoundly social science question attached to it, and that is that in the forestry industry it is now possible to build tall structures completely of wood. So you could build a 20-storey tower or a 40-storey tower, I think, completely out of wood. I'm not sure who'd want to live on the 39th floor, so it's a disruptive technology with no home.
Ontario has determined that now you can build a six-storey structure out of wood, so policy has changed, and that was as a result of research, undoubtedly. Perhaps on the safety side, that's reasonable. But the question is whether you would want to live on the 39th floor and what research would change Canadian attitudes about that, or not.
:
I need to go back to the challenge of recognizing that it's not a disruption, in my view anyway, until it's in the marketplace. I think it's okay to ask how do we understand the potential to either create a new market, or to displace technologies that are in an existing market. Normally the way most of the business assessments start is by asking if there is a market demand.
In the deck I presented there are a couple of diagrams. One of them.... Where we like to start is by asking: what are the market opportunities? If we understand market opportunities then we can ask what the technology gaps are that are preventing us from accessing those markets. If we understand the technology gaps then we can ask what the knowledge gaps are that are stopping us from inventing that technology. That's where the collaboration comes in.
One of the things I said in my remarks was that it is dangerous to try to pick the horse, but I think it's okay to pick the race.
When I say it's okay to pick the race, what I mean is that I'm reasonably sure there are going to be significant disruptions around the human-machine interface. I think artificial intelligence is one of those areas where Canada needs to build some good platform technologies because that's one of the places where we expect technologies to emerge that will be disruptive.
We can say the same for robotics and for additive manufacturing, with 3-D printing being one example.
When I look at the world, and if I look in the short term.... First you need to understand from the NRC perspective. We have work that is absolutely geared to support companies in the two- to five-year timeframe and sometimes even faster. We have work that is really in the midterm, although my particular division is trying to look a little more over the horizon. I learn from the markets that we currently understand, and that allows us to look forward and ask what the emerging market opportunities are.
That may be an indirect answer to your question. The disruptiveness of a technology has to do with our ability to think about how it's going to be used.
:
Well, I think it's important for us, at least from NSERC, to.... We tend not to use that kind of terminology because in many cases it's really up to the research itself as to where it goes and the course. That being said, and maybe to build on some of the discussions we've had earlier, our job at NSERC first and foremost is, for example, how to identify what's going on. Through the process of peer review we have 3,000 to 12,000 applications a year that come in from researchers around the country proposing ideas that they consider to be world class, ideas on science and knowledge that are above the grade. That's not only in Canada; we're talking globally.
The job of the peer reviewers, the people who understand those fields, is to understand whether they are actually working in areas that are exciting. Are they working in areas where there's growth? That's on the one side, and you need to continually have that because every other country in the world is doing the same thing. This is a constant of development that we can't miss out on.
The crux of the issue always comes down to how you apply that effectively. Again, we're back to the question of talking to those who are actually facing problems, be it market, be it social, and being able to say the knowledge that you have or the discoveries that you've made can help with what my issue may be.
Perhaps I may pick up a little bit on your discussion with Dan here about how you can tell when we're going to move to a disruptive piece. I think one of the things that is very evident here is that there's a price point. Probably the best example of that is in the information and communication technologies. Some of you may be familiar with what's called Moore's law, where the principle basically is a straight line—for every year there's a doubling in the power and halving of the price.
We're now into the third decade of Moore's law, and we're being able to do things that were unimaginable even two years ago. It's not only one little device that's involved. It's the whole knowledge that's come back and forth from the university community. Basic research, by the way, is not only done in universities. It is done in other institutions.
:
I think this is a very good question, and as you noted, it gets at something I talked about that I want to emphasize once again.
In this model that we tend to apply we think of basic research moving down a continuum to application. Then we ask the question about where the eureka moment lies.
What I want to suggest, and this comes back to something Kevin had said and Dan had emphasized as well, is that eureka moment quite often doesn't come from the scientist himself or herself. It may not even come from the research process itself, but from other members of the team so to speak, as you put it, who through their own lens have a look at a particular technology or consider some technology as disruptive through the lens of what a market might like, what might in fact generate significant interest from investors, what might in fact change the game completely.
That involves, and that implies, as you suggest, a team approach whereby scientists are working with social scientists and experts from business, economics, or anthropology, in order to develop those disruptive elements, because we know for example there are lots of technologies that wouldn't be considered disruptive until somebody gets the idea of how to make them disruptive. That speaks to Dan's point.
If you think about the automobile as a good example, a design is another key aspect of this. The automobile we currently know in some respects fulfills the same function as it has since the very beginning of its invention, for 100 years. In fact, apparently it doesn't even get much better gas mileage somebody told me.
But in terms of the design elements within the car, I would be willing to bet—you know the industry better than I do—most of the design elements have less to do with driving the car and more to do with the driver's experience. Whether your Bluetooth hooks into this or whether you can surf the web or how comfortable your seating is or how much attention you're paying to the road, or in my car, I have a system that will brake automatically for me in the event I'm not paying attention.
These things came from engineers but they also came from other social scientists, even humanists, who would have been able to provide the human aspect to the inventions or to the technology that was developed. It is a team effort, and it focuses on a lot more than the technology itself. The last point I would make, just to reiterate, is that quite often the disruptive element really comes from thinking about how these things are going to be used at the end of the day.
:
I think they'll have slightly different answers than mine, because I want to talk a bit more about process.
The kinds of things that I was talking about—design, the content piece, the things that really make technologies sing, that create the disruptions—quite often are not regarded in this society as research per se. It's quite interesting. If you think about design, I have this iPhone. It's my own iPhone, and it makes a great flashlight until you start to get into it and see what I have in there. I have books, movies, music, and a lot of cultural products and content. That all was added to the element to kind of make it sing.
Some of the research they do, and particularly within companies, for example, in marketing and international markets and design, quite often, is not recognized as research per se. I can bet you it's not counted as an investment in research by our public accounts.
I know for example—and this is without comment—that our industrial tax credit system does not count research that would be done for business planning or marketing or content or design as an eligible expense for a tax credit. I said I would say this without comment, so I would just suggest that we need to start thinking a lot more about these elements in terms of managing and promoting disruptive technologies, or creating disruptive technologies from technologies that one might not consider so, as viable elements of the research process, value them, fund them, support them, and value them in industry. I think that's going to take us down the road.
:
We do recognize that there is a innovation gap. In Canada, the gap is a major one, to such an extent that the government established the Jenkins panel to address the issue. Your committee rightly refers to its report in your work on the issue.
In its report, the panel indicated that work must be done in various areas. First, the tax system and the way it is administered. Second, access must be much more closely linked to the market, an idea which will, in a way, be reflected by transforming the NRC. For NSERC, this means, without losing the richness of purely scientific inquiry, creating links to the programs we are conducting with industry.
For example, in 2009, the number of industrial partners with projects funded by NSERC was 1,500 companies per year. Five years later, that number climbed to 3,000 companies per year. We have put a lot of effort into adjusting our programming to create those funds.
In a way, I feel that you have touched upon the subject that is critical in this area, the labour force and the human resources. Those changes are made in people's minds. We are trying to do it more and more. With the emergence of Mitacs as—
:
I'd be happy to. I'm glad you looped back to something I wanted to touch on.
On the safety issue per se, I could come back to the example that I gave with the Forest Products Association of Canada and their 40-storey wooden buildings. A lot of that is, again, simply research that will help us to better understand these issues and help to lead the public to accept, in fact, what that shows.
But one of the things I wanted to touch on was the way in which we still maintain a fairly linear sense of discovery to invention, innovation, and application. I just want to give you an example of how the world really doesn't look like that, and it touches on your question of what the gap is.
In my former life, I was the vice-president of research at a major Canadian university. I can assure you that in Canada there are likely hundreds and hundreds of patents for amazing technologies sitting on the shelves of Canadian university technology transfer offices and being maintained at some considerable cost.
These are a couple of examples. An inventor had a 360-degree digital camera—amazing. The other one was a hand-held 3-D digital scanner, so he just basically moved the scanner. This goes back to a comment that was made by Madam Papillon. Have those technologies been adopted? No. Why? They're clearly disruptive somehow in the imagination, but the problem is that these things exist as scientific advances without a business planning culture, innovative thinking, or market savvy that would take them where they need to go. Sometimes we talk about receptivity, risk-taking on behalf of companies, who just haven't taken them up.
That's not a perfect answer to your question, but in part my feeling is that the gap exists, not with the development of the technology and our capacity to do that, because I think we're eminently capable given the things that we've done; it exists with the individuals who have the savvy, the ability, and the risk-taking attitudes that can take these technologies and imagine how they can be used in order to succeed in the marketplace. That is a gap in this country.
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I'm going to stick with you, if I can.
It's interesting that, when we talk about disruptive technology and we use that expression, there seem to be different ideas of what the definition would be, and they're really hard to define, in a sense. I think of it as when you say, “Life is completely different because of...” and name some technology. Historically when you think of big things you think of the car, electricity, air travel, the telephone—the original telephone, not the BlackBerry, but then the BlackBerry modifying that, in a sense.
Then you have things like Google Maps, which is not necessarily in the same category but takes a paper map and.... I know we're going to have the opportunity to talk to witnesses from Google and maybe we can ask them about this, because it's fascinating when they talk about how they determine the traffic patterns so that you know which route to take, based on where traffic has slowed down and sped up. It kind of revolutionizes the way we travel in our vehicles and those kinds of things.
This is why I'm going to come to you, Ted. I'm going to ask a question based on my personal experience. If we're going to talk about things that change lives completely, we're talking mostly here about things as opposed to ways of dealing with things, like autism. I have a 19-year-old son with autism and I think about in the seventies, when Dr. Lovaas in the United States developed an intensive behavioural intervention for people with autism, which changed the way we thought about people with autism and the possibilities for them.
Given that you're representing the social sciences and humanities, could you maybe speak to that in the sense of the notion of disruptive innovation, perhaps, in those types of areas?