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From its modest emergence out of UNB's computing services office in 2001 to its relocation two years later to Boston (home turf of its new U.S. bosses), the tale of
Q1 Labs has all the elements of a good magazine story. It's well written, there's a cast of colourful characters, and it contains enough bittersweetness to make its implications worth pondering. For our annual focus on R&D and commercialization, it is a terrific case study.
But when writer Joshua Samuel pitched the Q1 Labs story to me as New Brunswick's Vimy Ridge, I admit that I thought the comparison a bit much. Personally, I was more taken with his recounting of founding president Brian Flood's conviction that the Q1 tech guys could be to UNB and New Brunswick what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had been to Stanford University and Silicon Valley. I realize now that he referenced the heroic 1917 battle for a reason, because the legacy of Q1 Labs was transformational for those involved and for that province. This fascinating tale, which is best described as the anatomy of a tech transfer, begins on page 36.
Behind all of this drama, of course, is the fact that in the late 1990s UNB was finally given a strong mandate to commercialize technology being developed on its campuses. The administrators who were operating in what is now the Office of Research Services at the Fredericton campus knew that tech transfer was the way to build the province's economy.
One of those bright lights was John McLaughlin, UNB's current president, who is as convinced now as he was then that commercializing R&D and building capacity for innovation is the path to regional prosperity.
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There is another university president in this region with a similar name, but it's spelled MacLauchlan, and his first name is Wade. The president of UPEI, Wade MacLauchlan is another disciple to the cause of commercializing university-based research and connecting it with business types who can attract financing and grow successful companies out of it. Wade feels that we have a limited timeframe within which to make measurable progress in this area, however, and he pegs it at half a decade. That's not much time.
It is well known that universities are doing most of the R&D here (look out for a study by Gardner Pinfold for the Atlantic Association of Universities on the impact of unversities on the regional economy), but I think we can safely say that many more success stories are needed besides Q1 Labs and the handful of others (Rutter Inc. and North Atlantic Biopharma out of Memorial come to mind). With the recent launch of Springboard, a network of 14 of the region's 17 universities that is devoted to connecting campus-borne R&D with industry, we should see more commercialization activity taking place.
And what about the private sector? There are good examples of successful R&D-intensive companies operating here, such as Ocean Nutrition Canada and Coemergence (both profiled in this issue), but they are too few and far between.
The oft-cited reason for such a dearth of measurable R&D in the private sector is that our companies are mostly small and medium-sized, and investment in R&D
is expensive and, in fairness, perhaps imperceptible. So we asked finance writer Kevin Yarr to remind business owners about the availability of the SR&ED tax credit, a mechanism designed to support research and development that is underused by regional companies. You could be leaving R&D money on the table. Talk to your accountant and go for it.
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