National Research Council president John McDougall has a theory about why Canada doesn’t get full value out of the billions it pours into research.
Blame it on health care. The country spends nearly half of its research dollars in an area that produces relatively few spinoff benefits because Canada isn’t a global player, says Mr. McDougall, appointed last year by the Harper government.
“We don’t have a health industry, other than a consuming one. So it’s not really a surprise we don’t get much out of it,” the Alberta-bred engineer and businessman explains between bites of a sandwich and a cup coffee at Ottawa’s Fraser Café.
“We’re investing most of our assets in a race that might start in Canada, but ends in another country. It’s not that we don’t do good things, it’s that we’re exporting raw technology, and people.”
With the keen eye of a portfolio manager, Mr. McDougall is determined to get a better “return” on the nearly $1-billion a year Ottawa spends at the NRC by firmly rooting the country’s leading government research organization in a clutch of quintessentially Canadian projects.
And just maybe, he’ll help fix Canada’s innovation gap along the way.
So Mr. McDougall is moving the venerable 94-year-old institution away from pure “curiosity research” toward work on a cluster of key scientific challenges that have the potential to drive Canada’s economy. So far, the short list of four flagship projects, or “big ideas,” includes research into higher-output wheat strains, printable electronics, composite materials made from biomass and CO2-ingesting algae.
The NRC can “sprinkle” resources around the country, hoping some of its bets pay off over time, or it can “steer the ship a little more,” he said.
“We’re dealing with limited resources, and it’s not as if there is a mattress full of money that keeps replenishing itself. We’ve got to get value out of it.”
The transformation is not without controversy. Critics have complained about Mr. McDougall’s lack of a science background (he doesn’t have a master’s or a PhD), his penchant for projects most likely to benefit Western Canada and his attraction to research in areas he put his own money as a private investor.
And inside the NRC, there’s grumbling about his efforts to turn scientists and researchers into salespeople and promoters.
But Mr. McDougall is unapologetic. Canada, he pointed out, is too small a country to do everything. So it must develop critical mass by better targeting its R&D efforts.
“Canada has a psyche, and the psyche is one of fairness, which leads to a slice-and-dice mentality,” he lamented.
If Calgary has a medical school, Edmonton wants one, too. And the pattern, he argued, is replicated across the country, with every dollar spent on R&D.
“It’s very hard to develop critical mass when we are continually chopping it up,” he said. “But if we don’t get critical mass, then we’re never going to develop more RIMs in this country,” referring to Research In Motion Ltd., the Waterloo-Ont.-based maker of BlackBerry smart phones.
Mr. McDougall is an Albertan to the core – a fourth-generation Edmontonian who made his living in the oil patch and real estate before taking over the Alberta Research Council in 1997.
He’s blunt, but amiable, peppering his sentences with expressions such as “by golly” and “surely to God.”
And he grumbles good-naturedly about the Ottawa bureaucracy: “It’s a very well-refined art, and there’s lots of it.”
But the smile fades as he describes the conflicts between the demanding timelines of the NRC’s private sector customers and the endless questions and requests he gets from inside the government.
“The one word I hate in this town is ‘template.’ There’s always a new template,” he complained of the traditional ways of doing things.
