Hearing Without Listening

"What We Heard: Tri-agency engagement with the research community on modernization of the federal research support system" provides more questions than answers

In June, the government asked for input on the creation of a capstone organization to oversee the operations of the tri-council agencies that themselves oversee Canadian academic research funding. Just recently, the government’s synthesis of the feedback was released in a report that seeks to consolidate the themes in those submissions.

I set out to write a detailed critique of the report but found almost nothing of substance about which to write. Overall, this report is emblematic of the approach taken by the current government to new programming: many declaratory statements, but not much detail on the practicalities of implementation and little in the way of unifying intention.

Most important, though, the report is almost entirely missing mention of the only area of focus to which the capstone agency could add much value: commercialization of publicly-funded research.

The issue of Canada’s inability to benefit economically from its research outputs has been the topic of discussion for decades, and has been explicitly mentioned in every federal report on research funding written in the last 20 years, including the letter that invited the feedback that led to this report, and yet somehow the idea of commercialization only appears in this report in a single paragraph, relegated to an afterthought on metrics for tracking health research impact.

The concept of intellectual property is mentioned twice, and in neither place is there any discussion of practical issues related to securing benefit from it, with no thought given to how we engage in public-private partnerships, or why the IP generated by our research so rarely ends up in the Canadian private sector.

“Economic impact” and “economic growth” receive a bit more attention, but are mentioned only in the context of assessing the impact of health research specifically, with no discussion at all of how that is to be achieved or how it connects to research activity.

Disappointing, to say the least.

Below, I attempt to extract some insight from the report, but my primary takeaway is simply that there is still an enormous amount of foundational work to be done if this initiative is to have any value, and we are not off to a promising start.

There are a few points that are well made. In particular, the report recognizes a need for ongoing community engagement and that responses to the consultation call were rushed and likely incomplete as a result. Given the short submission period, it is abundantly clear that ongoing consultation with the innovation community is needed if this proposed agency is to be useful.

The report also clearly identifies a need for more robust mechanisms through which to assess the impact of research, a key piece of policy design that is missing from very nearly the entirety of Canadian innovation programming.

Finally, the report does a good job identifying its own weaknesses is in the section entitled “Mission-driven, international and interdisciplinary research”. It appears that a common theme across the submissions related to questions around the meaning of these buzzwords in practice, meanings that are not elucidated in this report but which are at last acknowledged to be missing.

It is somewhat ironic that despite the focus on “mission-oriented research,” mission-orientation was apparently not present in building this report. Without a clear set of definitions around the target outcomes of the capstone agency, submissions responding to the call are left asking more questions than receiving answers, which is a key driver of the ambiguities left in the description of the new capstone agency.

As a guide to ongoing community engagement, it is perhaps important to provide another reminder of why innovation policy reform is so badly needed in Canada: the entire point of repeated calls for reform to the way Canada manages its research is to find a way to address our inability to turn research into economic and social benefit.

That’s it. That’s the mission. Everything else is implementation detail.

The call to improve coordination among the tri-council agencies is not to enable more interdisciplinary research for its own sake; it is because interdisciplinary research is to an increasing degree the primary driver of economic and social benefit arising from research globally.

The call to enhance critical connections between research and the end users of knowledge is not for the sake of press releases; it is to ensure that the Canadian private and academic sector players (established companies, entrepreneurs, and inventors) that could be receptors for IP arising from publicly-funded research are aware of what is being done.

The call to preserve the strong aspects of Canada’s research pipeline is not so that we can continue add a disproportionately large number of pdfs to the global academic pdf-pile; it is so that we can continue to produce a high quality and quantity of research while the rest of the innovation pipeline builds in ways to tap the currently underused natural resource that is the IP contained therein.

The call to streamline the bureaucratic processes through which research funding is allocated is not because we want to more efficiently generate technologies that die on the vine as soon as the paper is published or the patent is filed; it is because the nightmare that is Canada’s innovation-related bureaucracy currently fails to do anything except erect barriers to translation of science into economic and social impact.

While I can appreciate the desire to move quickly given impending political shift and associated uncertainties, it is clear from this report that the rush to get this done is not helping. Doing this wrong is worse than not doing it at all, because delivery of an ineffective program will kill any future political will to try to do it right.