The federal government is backing a new organization to connect Canada’s top research and development (R&D) talent with the companies that need them.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced the launch of Talent Innovation Canada (TICAN) on Thursday morning, supported by $29 million in federal funding that was initially proposed in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement. TICAN will work with Canadian firms to identify their R&D challenges, then match them with graduate students who will research and work on those problems as part of their theses.
“The student is getting to solve the hard problem, and then the company is really incentivized to hire the student on at the end, because this is the person who developed the key ideas behind their technologies,” University of Toronto professor and TICAN CEO Arvind Gupta explained to BetaKit in an interview on Thursday.
Gupta said this is key to addressing Canada’s productivity gap, as well as mitigating the number of Canadian graduate students who decide to work with US-based companies. The program has been in a pilot phase over the past several months, and Gupta said that so far there has been high interest, with six problems for every one student.
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Gupta has ample experience with the student-company matchmaking model; he also leads a similar program called Electric Vehicle Innovation Ontario. The program launched in December with $2.5 million in federal funding to embed 37 graduate researchers from Ontario universities into 20 of the province’s EV and mobility companies over nearly three years.
“Companies tell us that when this works … this makes Canada a very attractive place to do R&D,” Gupta said of TICAN. “You kind of de-risk exploring new things, of course … the best ideas are often ones that come from left field.”
TICAN launches with a focus on addressing industry needs in four sectors: mobility, clean growth, biomanufacturing and life sciences, and microelectronics and information and communications technology.
Gupta said these are “very much aligned” with the federal government’s industrial development strategies, with mobility impacting automotive, aerospace, and ship manufacturing, and “clean growth” focusing on cleantech as the government boosts natural resources development.
“This is a chance for the government to say, ‘let’s make sure we’re also bringing great innovations into these sectors,’ because that creates sustainability for those sectors long-term,” Gupta said.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by ThisisEngineering.