From mining critical minerals, making batteries, recycling batteries, and even software, the electric vehicle (EV) supply chain is a wide-open sandbox. The only question is, where will Canada build its castle?
“Let’s figure out where there’s hunger to be part of the solution and up the odds that we’ll succeed there.”
The Electric Vehicle Innovation Ontario (EVIO) program is trying to find out. The program launched in December with $2.5 million in federal funding from FedDev Ontario to embed 37 graduate researchers from Ontario universities into 20 of the province’s EV and mobility companies over nearly three years.
The thrust, as scientific director and University of Toronto professor Arvind Gupta explained to BetaKit in an interview on Monday, is to match the right academic mind to an EV company’s research and development project.
“If I was in a company and I was trying to solve some part of the problem, and I had to hunt around in 97 universities to find the right person, that’s a really tough proposition,” Gupta said. “But if we can make that match happen faster, get people in there faster, get the technology developed faster, it just increases your odds of success.”
The program is led by the University of Toronto’s department of computer science, in partnership with seven other southern Ontario universities: University of Windsor, Western University, University of Waterloo, York University, Toronto Metropolitan University, Queen’s University, and University of Ottawa.
When the right student-advisor combo is found for a company project, the project becomes a core part of the graduate student’s degree, and the company pays for half the associated costs.
Gupta explained that this process will help shake out which companies are “really keen” to work on their innovations. In theory, this will cultivate talent and create a research hub in southern Ontario, where participating companies are required to have a presence.
“Once you start developing the technologies, you’re going to develop the next iteration of the technology here, too, because you’ve got the people that developed the first iteration,” Gupta said. “That creates a sustainable industry.”
RELATED: Xanadu, NRC, and U of T partner on using quantum to improve electric vehicle batteries
Gupta said the program is still in the early stages, courting companies, projects, and universities to figure out where all the pieces will come together. But when they do, students will be working on challenges across the EV supply chain. This can include improving battery chemistry, charging reliability, mobility software, cold-weather performance, and advanced manufacturing. Any of these could be the slice of the EV market Canada is known for.
“We can’t be part of everything; we’re just too small to own this from getting the mineral out of the ground, to building all the EVs in the world, and then remediating them at the end,” Gupta said. “So let’s figure out where there’s hunger to be part of the solution and up the odds that we’ll succeed there.”
As discourse around the United States’ gravitational pull over Canadian talent persists year over year, another hopeful byproduct of the EVIO program is talent retention, Gupta said. He explained that if Canadian talent works with a company to create great tech, the company has an incentive to hire that person, keeping them in Canada. He added that research and development has “lots of stickiness,” and that moving teams is next to impossible when that means asking talent to uproot their lives.
“In mining, you have to find the ore body; in the innovation space, you have to find the talent body,” Gupta said. “If you’ve got a critical mass of talent here that’s developing great things, why would [companies] move them?”
Feature image courtesy University of Toronto. Photo by Matt Hintsa.