AIMDay fosters collaborations between industry, academia

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This article was published 15/11/2022 (1395 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The challenge of establishing more industry-academia collaborations in Manitoba seems never to be resolved.

Politicians, industry leaders, academics all bemoan the fact that it doesn’t happen enough.

But there is no one correct way to do it that excludes all others, so the search for the best practice ought never end.

About three years ago, the Manitoba Industry-Academia Partnership was formed with funding from PrairiesCan (formerly Western Economic Diversification) to help foster partnerships for the sake of the prosperity of the whole province.

It was formed almost simultaneously with a report that came out in early 2020 — itself a collaboration between the Business Council of Manitoba and all the province’s post-secondary institutions — called Horizon Manitoba which made clear the need for closer association between industry and academia both for a re-alignment regarding industry’s skills needs for the future and for greater workplace experience opportunities for students.

MIAP has taken up that mantle and has been organizing various sector specific roundtable discussions to hear about the innovation needs of the private sector.

It has also acquired a license from Uppsala University in Sweden to operate a structured collaboration event called AIMDay (which stands for Academic Industry Meeting Day).

Last week MIAP held its third such event and the first in-person version.

The way it works is for private sector companies or any kind of independent organization to think about a research project they need to address. For instance, at last year’s event one company asked how they could increase the amount of recycled materials in its concrete.

MIAP puts together a number of academics who have expressed interest in participating and who also have expertise in the field.

At AIMDay they get together for a one hour discussion where the industry participants and the academic researchers meet each other and in addition to discussing technical or practical issues, they also get to discover if they actually get along.

Both parties then decide if they would like to pursue a project and the researchers then have a very short window to produce a general, brief description of the project.

MIAP can then provide modest funding. enough to pay a grad student, for instance, to write a more fulsome proposal that might then be able to be used to seek more substantial funding from the likes MITAC or NSERC.

Darren Fast, the director of the University of Manitoba’s office of Partnerships and Innovation, who originally brought the AIMDay concept to Manitoba, said, “The researchers have to be prepared to work at the speed of business.”

Fast says the process really works.

“It is amazingly efficacious,” he said. “We get companies to tell us what some of their challenges are and then rather than try to pick the right researcher within the whole post-secondary system we bring a diverse group of people around it that we think have the right attitude and right skills to maybe work on the problem.”

Myrna Grahn, the manager of MIAP, said that while it may not be easy getting academia, the sector councils, governments and all the different industry organizations working more collaboratively instead of in their own silos, they now have a bit of a system in place and are getting some traction.

“This is what MIAP is working hard to do,” she said.

MIAP’s version of AIMDay is unique among the dozen or so iterations that exist in Canada and around the world in that rather than match industry with researchers from just one post-secondary institutions it is mining the expertise from every post-secondary in the province, from the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology to University College of the North to the universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg.

And whereas collaborations from different institutions might also be a challenge, Grahn said MIAP does the communication to keep it all together.

At this year’s AIMDay, the projects being discussed cut broadly, from how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve healthcare patients’ experience, to better manipulation and display of data for arts organizations, to how to advance the use of AI in the aerospace sector.

Vic Gerden, who operates an aerospace consultancy and is also chair of an organization called WestCaRD that itself seeks to attract and leverage technologies to create technology transfer and commercialization opportunities in the sector, participated in this year’s AIMDay.

He said it would be normal for him to limit his exposure to the universities’ engineering departments or to specific applied technology people at Red River College.

“At this event today event today I had a sit down session with researchers from computer science and statistics researchers,” he said. “Something may or may not materialize. We’ll have to take the time to suss it out.”

But he said he understands the need to explore and network.

“I need to understand the expertise that is available and then the potential for collaboration,” he said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca