NCIT bounces back from turmoil in Ottawa’s telecommunications sector

When Ottawa’s National Capital Research Institute of Telecommunications (NCIT) opened its doors in 2000, the future for collaborative research between industry, government and academia couldn’t have seemed brighter. The region was riding a telecommunications boom and NCIT executives and its supporters were anticipating that the red hot sector would grow even bigger. With $36 million in cash and in-kind committed over five years, it had the tools to fuel the kinds of collaborative research needed to generate promising new intellectual property and new skilled workers (R$, June 9/00).

Then there was the crash of the telecommunications equipment sector and the disastrous plunge of Nortel Networks Corp, throwing NCIT’s best laid plans into turmoil. Its leadership — on secondment from Nortel — took early retirement packages and departed. Industry pulled back just as the first slate of research projects were being implemented and that hesitancy spilled over to the university partners, who were reluctant to commit students to projects with less than secure funding.

The jolts staggered the telecom industry and shook the confidence of the region’s high tech sector, effectively sending NCIT back to the drawing board. Now it’s making a strong re-emergence under the new leadership of ex-Nortel executive Dr Robert Crawhall and research director Dr Mohamed Zaid, forging ahead with a new membership structure, a proactive board of directors, changes to its research program and new opportunities stemming from the human fallout of a major industry contraction.

“Our big challenge is going to be getting industry to the table because in Canada that’s how we do it. Government tends to be tied to industrial participation … As the balance of innovation shifts into the smaller enterprise sector, our model has to adapt but I think the model is adaptable,” says Crawhall. “It think it’s a strategic advantage. It’s tough sledding sometimes, but it keeps you focused on the core purpose of industrializing this stuff.”

The turmoil that hit the telecom sector has played havoc with NCIT’s research projects, which are now months behind schedule. But a recent review of those projects shows progress and another slate of projects are set for launch. Another major change was the model of participation for industry, which has shifted from one of membership to partnership. Instead of committing fixed sums at the outset, firms now determine their level of participation and commit resources that are proportionate to what they expect to get out of the research projects.

Industry’s preoccupation with surviving the telecom downturn has allowed NCIT to focus attention on building alliances around its major research themes, re-modelling research projects and courting smaller industry players to come forward with their skills and expertise. Plans to develop alliances around its four research themes (see chart) has led to the formation of the Ottawa Photonics Research Alliance, and similar bodies are under development for wireless, network security, haptics (devices that allow human-machine interaction through force and touch) and others. While the alliances being built by NCIT are largely regional in scope, haptics presents a unique opportunity to build a global alliance. Canada has strength in this emerging field of research, along with other countries such as the US and Australia.

“From an NCIT perspective, alliances are a tactic or strategy for creating communities of research, so you really get a picture of what’s going on around town. We try to deal with the research community in Ottawa as a totality and allows the research community know who it actually is,” says Crawhall. “NCIT at the end of the day is very much about the research capability of Ottawa. That’s one of its distinguishing features – it’s the uniqueness of the resources within the geography and the ability for collaboration to happen because of physical proximity. There’s a human side to doing research and it works better when your researchers are in physical contact.”

NCIT is also playing a major role in retaining the large number of telecom professionals cut adrift when the region’s large firms drastically cut their workforces.

“Ottawa has had an amazing infusion of talented people from all over the world in the last four or five years (and) many are now between jobs. There’s interest in actually keeping them and at the same time our universities have this huge need for hiring over the next few years. It’s sort of obvious, “ he says. “You need some capital and critical mass but at the end of the day we’re talking about ideas and creativity and innovation and that’s a people function. If you’ve got them, keep them. It’s what our funders are looking for us to do. Jobs and growth. It has to be everybody’s focus.”

In addition to the collapse of Nortel, NCIT also had to deal with the purchase of major partner Newbridge Networks Corp by the French telecommunications giant, Alcatel. The new owners were hesitant to commit resources to an institute when its attention was focused on incorporating Newbridge into its global research operations. But a confluence of interests has led to a renewal in Alcatel’s participation.

“Alcatel has its head around what it’s doing in research in Ottawa so we’ve had to manage that fairly major shift in focus from one of the big partners,” says Crawhall. “We’re on the map and their foreign labs noticed where we’re going with the thrust in network security and networking and network management. That’s ultimately what they’ve decided they are doing here. It’s completely different from what the Newbridge involvement in the projects was.”

Five years from now, NCIT hopes to have a series of tightly integrated programs between the federal laboratories and area universities and colleges, with active participation from a large number of smaller firms as well as a handful of larger players. As for future funding, public investment will still play a major role.

“When a country or a province or a city makes a commitment to innovation, they’re going to have to understand the dynamics of that in terms of building it and fuelling it,” he says. “That’s going to come in a number of different ways. It’s going to come in changing how tax credits, work, by funding infrastructure, strengthening the region’s laboratories by giving them bigger budgets and clearer mandates. And we have to work that interface between industry and research which is poorly managed. We’re learning and we’ve made yards of progress but we still have a long way to go.”

R$