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Malaspina University-College |
Canada’s Innovation Strategy
Comments from
Malaspina university-College—
a REgional Resource
Malaspina University-College was established 30 years ago to serve the regional needs of coastal and mid-Vancouver Island communities. Both the communities and the institution have grown and are transforming as we evolve into a knowledge-based economy. Ten years ago, Malaspina College, along with five other community colleges in the province of B.C., were awarded degree-granting status. Three years ago, Malaspina became a member of the AUCC, giving us the rare opportunity of combining the best of both worlds. Our name change to Malaspina University-College reflects our strengths—strong excellence in teaching values; responsiveness and service to regional needs; and research and scholarly activity. The name change also reflects inherent characteristics that can support and further Canada’s Innovation Strategy—an openness, a willingness to collaborate and build networks, an eagerness to learn, and a strong awareness of both our strengths built on our past and those leading us to our future.
The Innovation reports Achieving Excellence: Investing in People, Knowledge and Opportunity and Knowledge Matters: Skills and Learning for Canadians are much needed documents that help create a common vision that we can help work towards. In addition, the reports can help us make an investment in what is needed in order to innovate and build capacity that will result in applied research excellence.
University colleges are a vital, underutilized resource that can contribute to all four challenge areas: an innovative environment; skills and learning; knowledge performance; and strengthening of our communities through research, education, technology transfer, and economic development, especially in the regions in which we are located. Through our close ties with our local regions, university colleges can help strengthen our communities by assisting in identifying and tailoring innovative strategies unique to our regions and circumstances.
· We encourage initiatives that are not urban-specific and ones that recognize the importance of unique regional and rural needs.
· We believe it is important to build on regional needs and regional strengths. For example, in our case, serving Vancouver Island and coastal communities, we are looking at developing our strengths and focusing on aquaculture, environmental interactions and socio-economic coastal issues.
· We encourage the establishment of provincial and regional councils, such as a BC "Dynamic Leadership Council", with representation from university colleges.
Smaller universities and university colleges are inherently closer to the communities in which they operate. Larger institutions have to work at this integration; we come by it naturally. This integration gives rise to a greater proportion of targeted, regionally relevant research in the public interest. This is not to say that research is limited to the region. On the contrary, researchers at smaller institutions are more likely to ask regionally relevant questions, but done correctly, these can be universally applicable. We like to think in terms of, “regionally relevant, globally significant” research.
· Federal granting agencies need to create specific initiatives that stimulate research and innovation at university colleges and small universities, thereby recognizing that some long established programs do not always fit our environment or our regional needs.
As both an emerging institution and a small institution,
Malaspina University-College recognizes the importance of building a research
environment, supporting the development of intellectual property, and the
economic development of innovation.
However, we also need to recognize some challenges that we face. With the help of the Innovation Strategy, we
can help address these issues.
If we are to strengthen our communities and support healthy, diversified innovation at the local level, then institutions serving smaller regional need are critical to achieving that success. If we are to meet our regional needs, we have to develop capacity in our regions at our smaller and usually rural-based institutions. There are two aspects of capacity building that need to be addressed: the broadening of capacity and the deepening of capacity. Small institutions need to do both. We have to develop broader capacity—capacity that can deal with a wide-range of needs that are increasingly complex and yet integrating them in creative ways—and we have to develop deep strengths in areas that matter to our communities and regions.
Emerging institutions face difficulties that older, more established institutions have already overcome. Budgets and workload formulas are based on needs that have expanded. Emerging institutions are faced with special capacity building challenges, such as the need to create: an ethos of innovation, and a culture of research and innovation; a support service infrastructure; collaborative links with larger institutions, and national and international partners; and build the deep research needed in some key targeted areas. Issues facing emerging institutions are of a developmental nature and therefore require assistance in the form of a developmental plan of action with specific targets and end points.
· We need federal initiatives that strategically target capacity building for both emerging and small institutions. A ten-year capacity building program is of critical importance to small and emerging institutions.
· The one time indirect costs grant was a much-needed form of assistance to small universities. The federal government should consider making this a permanent program, one that recognizes the disadvantages that smaller institutions face.
· The federal government should work with the provincial governments in recognizing the importance of regional universities and jointly address operational and research funding issues.
· The Canada Research Chairs program, we believe, will be important to our development. The ability to convert tier-one chairs to tier-two chairs will allow us to attract and support the researchers needed for the future.
Emerging institutions such as Malaspina University-College were built as teaching institutions, and the resulting facility infrastructure creates challenges for students and faculty to find research space. While CFI helps to address the development of targeted research infrastructure, the awards process is based on national competition, not regional needs, and while this works very effectively in deepening existing capacity, it does not effectively address broadening capacity. Malaspina University-College believes strongly in undergraduate student involvement in research, and is faced with the impossible task of choosing between traditional teaching space, such as classrooms, and newer learning inquiry-based methodologies that require research space that doesn’t exist.
· We applaud the CFI infrastructure program and support its continuation. We also encourage the expansion of the program, to direct infrastructure towards new faculty at small and emerging institutions, and develop research infrastructure that targets capacity building.
Faculty at small institutions are faced with challenges in entering the field of research. Smaller institutions have less faculty, especially nationally recognized faculty, that can mentor them, help them enter the field of research, and build up the experience and reputation to compete on a national scale. They also face the challenge of not having the same resources to back them that they would receive at larger, better-funded universities. The institutions they come from have regional and provincial mandates and, as such, tend to focus on those mandates, which makes it more difficult to compete in national competitions and on national priorities which may be different. Larger institutions have greater support structures for encouraging innovation and research. For smaller institutions, even having support for the writing stage of a large application, such as the CFI Infrastructure grants, is crucial.
· Federal agencies should design funding structures that address the innovation continuum, from developing capacity to supporting the innovation process. Seed money is needed at the idea and proposal writing stage, and later for project management, accounting and evaluation.
· We applaud and support the continuation of funding mechanisms such as the grant development funds sponsored by BC Science Council and Western Economic Diversification that have enable us to submit applications that help us build infrastructure. We encourage the federal granting agencies to continue and expand similar programs, such as the INE Development grants.
· Research dissemination is important yet is costly, especially for researchers in the sciences who face publication costs. Initiatives that provide publication funding will help increase knowledge dissemination.
The investment of research dollars at smaller institutions can make a proportionately larger difference to students, faculty, and the community. In a sense, it can be argued that there is a greater positive impact per dollar at the smaller institutions, where research activity naturally flows into the classroom and touches a greater number of students earlier in their academic careers. We need to capture the imagination of students earlier, in high schools and as undergraduates, to encourage and foster interest in higher education, innovation, and knowledge development. Again, smaller undergraduate universities and university colleges are uniquely positioned to fulfill this mandate.
A key issue facing innovation is the need to increase the number of graduate level students. We believe a strategic way to do that is to build stronger undergraduate programs that provide opportunities for students in research, cooperative experiences, and the development of a culture of inquiry.
· Undergraduate programs should be included in cooperative research programs.
· The Federal Government should consider the importance of research at the undergraduate level by supporting and encouraging programs that would foster innovation and research, and provide institutional incentives for developing innovative undergraduate research programs.
An innovative environment requires
developing collaborative networks, knowledge dissemination, and community
dialogue. With support from the Federal
Government, university colleges can help bring this about.
· Sustainable nodes of regional excellence require targeted and focused funding, with an emphasis on developing strong centres, building on existing strengths to maintain excellence in applied research. Initiatives that provide and support this focus are needed.
In conclusion we wish to note that without continued and sustained federal and provincial collaboration national innovation strategies will not work effectively particularly in smaller, regional, universities. At such institutions, and in their regions, the payoff for relatively modest investments is large and helps create research nodes that sustain and enhance local economies and at the same time link these economies to international markets. The belief that we can undertake regionally relevant, globally significant research is realistic given appropriate support.