Innovation: to be continued

Conclusion by Dr. Calvin Stiller

Shakespeare, in his ever-bright language, said something in The Tempest that I think sums up much of what you have read in this book.

"What's past is prologue; what to come in yours and my discharge."

We, Ontario, and we, Canada, have made investments in university research that have been exciting, innovative and, beyond all else, necessary. The culture of complaint that dominated research life in the early 1990s, the sense among our scientists and engineers that to stay in Canada was the equivalent of committing career hara-kiri, has passed.

But we are not on safe ground yet.

The first reality is that in the modern world, when you stop investing in technological infrastructure, discovery dies. In many ways, machines are not simply the vehicles we use to do science, they are science. Evidence of this are Steve Scherer's remarks about how computers have turned genetics from a question-based science to a relationship-discovering science.

The truth is, if you don't have the best, fastest and smartest technology at hand, you will stall. The technologies we now have - and the facilities to house them - need to be renewed every three to five years. If not, an inevitable discovery stagnation will turn into a discovery backslide and then a discovery sinkhole.

To illustrate this point, let's look at RIM. When BlackBerry was introduced in 1997, it was simply a two-way pager, not a telecommunications revolution. If we hadn't upgraded and redefined its technology, radically and often, RIM wouldn't be where it is today.

The second part to consider is that we are not alone in the discovery and application process. In 1995, China was 14th in the world in the publishing of science and engineering papers. In 2005, it climbed to fifth - and, in 2007, second. In addition, from 1985 to 2005, the number of natural sciences and engineering doctoral degrees in China increased sevenfold.

India is surging as well. Suddenly, the race to discovery is becoming harder to win. As the cliché goes, to even stay still means we have to run faster.

Then there is the paradox of the relationship of research-to- research translation that person after person has remarked upon. When it comes to research, Ontarians are inventive and world-class and much admired. But in general, what we discover usually fails to escape the university laboratory and science paper silo. That hasn't changed enough over the last nine years. Witness all the fascinating research featured in this book - I personally love the superclean rooms in a mine and the cell death that gives cells life.

When it comes to translating this research into product, Ontario drops the baton over and over again. When you look at the local biomedical companies in Toronto, as well as the city's huge hospital/ U of T research conglomerate, the result looks pale and anorexic when held up against Boston or San Francisco or San Diego or even Israel.

Translation failure also means that while RIM has become a world-ranking technology producer, there are really no RIM 2 - or RIM 3 - type companies in Ontario. This is particularly worrisome in a country where on a per-research-pound basis, Montreal and Vancouver seem to be translating discovery into innovation quicker and more often than we are.

But I don't mean to bemoan the past and its partial successes and partial failures. Today's prologue is the quest for a brighter future. So let me tell you what we should do in the future. Dream, and do that dreaming high, wide and passionately. What we have to do in this age of economic uncertainty is inspire ourselves. We have to convince ourselves that we are not the planet's has-beens, and to do that I suggest these concrete steps:

First, we have to be honest with ourselves. We have to ask ourselves where we stand in the world and where we are slipping in the research cosmos. We need to do this without exaggeration because the past is prologue. I believe we need to decide that we are not going to put up with the muddle of operation funding that is currently in place in our country. Yesterday OIT helped buy the latest machines, but today we don't have the funds to operate them efficiently. Yesterday we hired the smartest people, but today we still don't have enough money for their post-doc salaries. Operating funds and salaries are not a luxury. Otherwise, machines will sit idle, discovery will slow down and the world will pass us by.

I think we must begin to focus Ontario-specific research. We can't expect to be best at everything. So we have to pick our spots and focus on them. In this regard, I do believe I am accurate to point to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Waterloo Institute for Quantum Computing as models for how the province could and should pick areas of emerging excellence.

But most important of all, we must make university translation of discovery not a pleasant surprise or simple accident. Rather, we need to make it an imperative. And in this regard, I truly believe in Thomas Friedman's wonderful line, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist."

So my fistful notion is: Make tenure or salaries or sabbaticals in some areas dependent upon at least the beginning of translation. Make professors realize that their careers - at least in part - are dependent on them giving back to this country that supports them. Reward universities and university tech officers too. To this point, I wonder: Do we need to privatize that part of academic life? Do we effectively develop a homegrown version of the U.S. Bayh-Dole Act that unleashed the power of private enterprise in an arena where the American government controlled patents? At least we should think long and hard about doing this.

The Ontario government should do whatever it can to convince venture capital money to come here and venture. Make the province an exemplar to the world. No more excuses and hmms. Rather, like Star Trek's Captain Picard, let us announce a capital investment goal to ourselves and then give ourselves the command: Make it so.

And let's do this quick. Do this before we start walking around talking about how if the past was prologue, it was a prologue to decline and missed opportunities. Make our future our own and not what the world's commodities-market economy forces us to be.

I feel as if I am on a soapbox here, but as much as I love this province, I also want to respect it too. I want our sense of selves to be that of innovators. I want the past to become a prologue - the prologue to a 21st-century that is even greater than its predecessor. And to give us strength to do this, I think of something that the famous Greek philosopher and mathematician Plato said almost 2,500 years ago: "Courage is knowing what not to fear."

Dr. Calvin Stiller is chair of OIT and chair of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. A member of the Order of Canada, Dr. Stiller is a professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario and serves on the board of directors of several private and public companies.