Shedding some light on innovation – Council to turn ideas into reality
By Martin Cash
Winnipeg Free Press, April 9, 2009
A multimillion-dollar construction project is underway at the I.H. Asper Clinical Research Institute. Tucked in behind St. Boniface General Hospital Research Centre, the 100,000-square-foot building is more visible from the other side of the Red River, as if it is trying to shy away from more immediate inspection.
The province’s newly formed Manitoba Innovation Council does not have public relations as one its mandates. But it is not hard to imagine that in its stated intention to come up with a more co-ordinated approach to technology commercialization for the province — and accessing the capital needed to fund that work — it will probably mean there will be greater public awareness of the assets that are already in place.
The construction work at the Asper Clinical Research Institute is part of a large cardiac development project at St. Boniface General Hospital and will include construction of patient care as well as research facilities on the first, fourth and fifth floors of the building.
Although the new facilities are surely going to fulfil important patient-care responsibilities, the research was the institute’s original concept. It was built during a brief flurry of spending in life sciences research earlier this decade. There is still plenty going on, but the sustainability and ultimate competitiveness of the research and development enterprise in the province could use some high-level planning.
That is just was the Manitoba Innovation Council is charged with doing. The council is more than a year in the making — its creation was disclosed in the 2008 provincial budget — but it’s not like there has been a hue and cry because it was so long in coming.
“Its test for success will be not whether it makes more recommendations for action but whether it can provide advice that will actually deliver action,” said Brian Kelcey, executive director of the Life Sciences Association of Manitoba.
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The institute’s $25-million construction price tag in 2002 was part of about $100 million of capital that was in play at the time that included the cost of the Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals at the University of Manitoba and $30 million that the Western Life Sciences venture capital fund had just raised.
That fund is fully subscribed and there is no obvious source of replacement capital. But seven years later, there is arguably a more mature infrastructure in place. Albert Friesen, CEO of Medicure Inc. and the city’s most experienced scientist/entrepreneur, is the co-chair of the council along with Joanne Keselman, interim vice-president academic at the U of M and its former head of research. “Some might say it’s just another committee, but I’m quite excited about it,” Friesen said.
He figures the idea that a group of senior professionals from diverse backgrounds stepping back to consider the best way to grow the province’s innovation sector could yield good new ideas on how to take the province’s strengths in research into the commercial realm.
Among the council’s resources is a consultant’s report — Towards an Integrated Technology Commercialization System for Manitoba — produced for the province and Destination Winnipeg last year. Its 36 recommendations require about $80 million over three years.
But even if you ignore the technicalities that it details as well as the wish list of new money, it does pose some addressable cultural issues.
For instance: “Manitoba’s technology commercialization stakeholders, including the province’s academic and research institutions, are not well integrated into a broader technology commercialization. The constrained funding environment and scale disparities between the individual organizations contribute to this situation.”
Jeff Zabudsky, president of Red River College, another member of the council, said it is too early to say what the group will accomplish. “But,” he said, “we do know we want to do this in a collaborative way.”
