A RE$EARCH MONEY Q&A with NRC President Iain Stewart

RE$EARCH MONEY managing editor Mark Henderson sat down with National Research Council president Iain Stewart on April 11 to discuss the organization’s recent internal consultations and plans for the future.  Stewart assembled seven Tiger Teams to fan out across the country and report back to him in preparation for a Spring Memorandum to Cabinet.

Q: When you launched the execution of your mandate letter you put a few tigers in your tank. They have now reported to you. Can you summarize the state of the NRC as reported by the teams?

A: We spoke to 2,500 people who participated in 370 consultation sessions. There was a sense of recognition, support and embracing of a range of changes that have occurred through the NRC transformation over the past few years. Generally people really like the idea of doing large-scale collaborative, multi-disciplinary, outcome-oriented programs. It’s become culturally part of what we do. As a science policy person that’s fantastic because it is a differentiator between what the NRC does versus what other people in the ecosystem do. We can do a seven-year, 100-researcher program focused on a topic. That’s our organizational capacity.

Some of the changes though have created a perception of more time and effort in supporting processes of outcomes. That would be the flip side. Program model is great, can we lighten the program model? Program model is great but how can we better leverage the program model? People raised ideas on how we consult on programs, where should we have programs, what kind of topics? There was lots of discussion of the program model and how it fits within the organization. What came out of that was how to better integrate the programs in the portfolios.

The second big topic of conversation is research excellence. There is a desire to have a little more time for more exploratory research, a little more support for engaging in research collaboration, more students, getting adjunct professors, more post-docs, attracting post docs to the NRC.

It’s important that the NRC not just have business innovation programs — although that will be immensely important for us as it’s a very large part of our mandate — but foundational programs like quantum (computing). A program where we’re working with the best and the brightest minds in Canada and internationally around what quantum can be for Canada. That’s a good example of where the NRC should probably have a program.

The third area would be facilities and research support. I asked them how many NHL hockey rinks in facilities space we have and the answer, I think, is 354 hockey rinks’ worth of research facilities space.

On innovation, how do we better support growing firms to scale, how do we better support business innovation? IRAP ITAs (industrial technology advisors) work with the company on their growth strategy; how does technology fit in that and what are the technology projects they’re trying to deal with? (But) there’s an outcome beyond our episodic relationship that begins to drive that file. We would love to better support them to grow to scale. How do we do that?

Q: I’d like to get a little bit more into using students and post docs. Has that gotten closer to change of practice?

A: It remains very important to us. We’re piloting right now a new post-doc approach. We did a call to all of our researchers internally and said, give us your ideas for what you’d like a post doc to work on and then we curated that response. We got over 100 ideas about where post docs could add real value and what would be the interesting projects they would work on. We picked 21 of those, put them on our web site and invited post doc applicants to look at them. I still have the ambition to substantially grow (the use of students and post docs) but for now were just testing the idea of the new approach to how we recruit post docs and attract them to come to the NRC.

Proposals to Government

Q: You have two reporting requirements to government – an initial stock taking and an MOU to Cabinet. You’ve done the first, where are you with the second?

A: We are on track to bringing forward a Cabinet proposal for this spring. The topics I’m talking about with you, some of those are things we can do within existing funding. There are a couple things where I don’t have the authority so if the government is interested in having the NRC doing these things, then they would have to enable that.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: Think about facilities. If I wanted to set up a collaborative facility with a university in an area, probably the structure we would use is a non-profit corporation.  I don’t have any authority right now. And maybe the government doesn’t want to provide me with that authority. It’s an example of an area that’s legitimately an open question.

Q: A few years ago, NRC opened an MRI facility in conjunction with University of Ottawa and was able to tap into Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) funding. It sounds like you did have some level of authority to collaborate.

A: The reason why this example is useful is because it gives an indication of authority I don’t have. But if I don’t get this authority it’s not a roadblock to collaboration. Imagine if we were setting up a major new science facility – some large physical asset. That would probably require a model of this nature. But taking equipment, CFI-funded equipment, and putting it in NRC facilities, there are several examples.  CHIME in Penticton, the radio telescope facility, is a major CFI-funded project right now with a University of British Columbia lead.

Q: When you arrived at the NRC, there was a suspension of directives made when the interim president (Maria Aubrey) was in place, one being extending the VP suite from 3 to 5. Have there been any decisions made as to that proposed change in the NRC’s C suite?

A: I’m not – and I’m going to show my hand – a big fan of organizational change. As many public civil servants will say to you, organizational change sometimes comes with a lot of disruptions. We have to complete that process. I anticipate we will make modest changes that will be almost workload-style related rather than dramatic reorganizational change. That’s part of the discussion.

Q: You’re a member of the deputy ministers committee on science and technology. How has this helped with your assessment activities, particularly with the government’s Innovation and Skills Plan taking shape?

A: I have a lot of close ties and interactions with ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development), because I spent a fair chunk of my career there. I work closely with them and with (ISED DM) John Knubley. On the Innovation Agenda that they’ve been working on in support of (ISED) Minister (Navdeep) Bains, I’ve been quite involved just in chatting with them. The DM committee on S&T is a great venue for the deputy community who have shared common issues to discuss. You know Janet King (President for Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency) is chairing that and it’s quite helpful to be on it. We have crosscutting issues like recruitment and excellence, how to support policy initiatives and facilities, so it’s actually very helpful.

Q: More policy makers are viewing Canada’s research and innovation assets as a national ecosystem with opportunities to link into provincial ecosystems – ones that are well developed. It seems this would be a perfect opportunity to form your thinking in terms of alignment with the larger role.

A: Absolutely. There is an evolution of the need to take a comprehensive understanding of our assets and facilities both within the higher education R&D system and the intramural system. But there are not yet mechanisms to do so. If you go onto CFI’s web site, it has a (research facilities) Navigator where you can find what the facilities are in this area. There are no intramural facilities on that navigator because CFI is concerned with the projects it has funded. But does that intellectually make sense?  If I was an external person looking for a research facility in Canada, do I care if Her Majesty paid for the asset through CFI or through some department’s appropriation if they’re both available for use? The DM committee on S&T is a great venue for that kind of comprehensive thinking. My personal view would be that that’s a role that CFI could play because they’re already the most comprehensive look we have of publicly funded infrastructure.

Q: When I asked (Science Minister) Kirsty Duncan post-Budget about the NRC she said she didn’t want to see the organization used as a political football as it had been in the past. Given the fact that she’s apparently assessed the situation, how are you approaching the recent history of the NRC from this perspective?

A: The NRC went through a lot of organizational change and it experienced what I would characterize as turbulence. You had transformation with a capital T, you had turbulence from external factors and you needed to continue to sustain a level of revenue generation to fund the organization’s salaries and so on. That’s the organization that I’ve joined. It’s a big part of the motivation behind the NRC Dialogue – to allow the NRC to talk to itself about what worked well, what hasn’t worked as well as we would like and therefore what would we like to do to better the operations of our organization and achieve its objectives in support of the Innovation Agenda.

There are areas where improvements can be made where we need to put a little flexibility back in the structures and support people doing that. In the pursuit of managing those changes, that turbulence, those external events and sustaining revenue, some things got put to the side for a while. As a community we say, actually those are important as well.

Federal Budget

Q: Your staff memo showed a general breakdown of a portion of the $59.6 million allocated to the NRC in the federal budget. But I could only track about $34 million. What about the other portion?

A: You’re mixing apples and oranges I think. Your $34 million would be the clean air, IRAP youth employment and collaboration with Indigenous stakeholders. Those are in addition to the $59.6 million, (which) comes from the clusters initiative of 2003. The pedigree of the funding is that it was B-base funding for the clusters initiative back in the day when the cluster program was launched and then it got renewed, then it got renewed again and again. So it’s been renewed multiple times and it has in effect become just part of our budget. So it’s for a continuation of our operating budget. It got repurposed into supporting business innovation so it’s part of the funding of the NRC … a very positive indication that they want to sustain the level of activity that we have.

Q: The NRC got out of the cluster game in 2010. It’s now back, and now the government is talking about superclusters. Do you see the NRC reengaging in more cluster-based activity?

A: We do programs and we do our programs in response to needs. We should do a program in support of the winning clusters. For each of those clusters we should come to them and say ‘what would you like us to do?’ The money for the clusters program is not available to the NRC; its contribution funding for external parties. I’m not coming to them saying we need money. I’m coming to them to say we have research capacity that is relevant to what you’re trying to do.

We have capacity and people who are already working with those companies (in the clusters). So if they organize themselves into a larger-scale ambitious agenda that’s a perfect place for us to work with them and develop a program to support their needs and agenda. The original (NRC clusters) program had a different notion for what a cluster was than what we see coming from the superclusters. Superclusters are quite new and the idea quite ambitious: there are going to be fewer, larger, more GDP. And then how do you bring advanced technologies into these significant amalgams of GDP, however they’re defined.

Q: Is the 2018 Budget something you’ve been targeting in terms of this process for where NRC is trying to go and the kind of resources that are required?

A: Budgets happen every year. We just had the 2017 Budget so anything that involves new funding is going to occur through Budget 2018. So in that you’re absolutely correct. But this is not about money. The NRC Dialogue is around betterment: how do we work with the changes we’ve been making; how do we make the work better; how do we improve the quality of programs; how do we better the context for our staff; how do we create the time for our staff to invest in their personal excellence, excellence in our organization, and the foundational technologies of tomorrow? It’s not a money issue.

We’re going to put out for our staff a summing-up paper for what they contributed (to the Dialogue), and then the ideas will work their way through. The ones we can do with our own resources and authorities, we’re just going to do it. We can start managing those issues and responding to them now, May, June, July, over the summer. Anything that requires new authority or additional funding, it’s not going to happen until 2018. It’s important not to design a process that’s hung up on the funding.

Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.