Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Vancouver campus is set to be the hub of a $22.9-million, five-year, federal initiative to help graduate and post-doctoral students commercialize research findings.
Scientists will essentially be trained to think about how their research could be applied in emerging-market niches and not just traditional ones. Recognizing those new opportunities is key in creating products that can be protected with patents.
The money comes from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Lab to Market program – an initiative that is separately providing $16.2 million to an initiative co-led by the University of the Fraser Valley and dubbed Sustainable Food Systems for Canada.
The $22.9 million that flows through SFU in the next five years is slated to expand an initiative called Invention to Innovation (i2I).
“All of the money comes to SFU, and then we can subcontract out,” Elicia Maine, SFU’s associate vice-president of knowledge mobilization and innovation, told BIV.
“A lot of it is going to go into the hands of students, into stipends for the key agents of change, who are going to be taking technologies out of the university and commercializing them.”
She called SFU the “nerve centre” of the program.
The i2I network includes a coalition of 13 co-applicant institutions that deliver training opportunities across Canada.
Maine said the new funding will be put toward three things.
First, it helps fund about 150 part-time student researchers each year to shape both their own innovation skills and capabilities as well as commercialization strategies in research going on in labs, she said.
She suggested that about 30 of those students might be at SFU. It would depend on which students apply and where they are located.
“We recruit,” she said. “We pick the very best students that are applying, and we don't mind if they're coming from SFU or UBC [or elsewhere.]”
Those students could be graduate students or post-doctoral researchers, Maine added.
A second way the money is set to be used is to fund 10 new full-time post-doctoral researchers each year with those people also coming from across the country.
“It's a really expensive program for the post-docs,” Maine said. “We're paying their full salary.”
The third way the money is to be spent is on training 20 new faculty members each year with one-week courses. That one-week training will take place at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus and at a conference centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in alternating years.
