OTTAWA — Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne said that a forthcoming federal agency will aim to fill a gap in government programs to support the commercialization of research in Canada.

The Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) “is very good for the big projects,” while the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) is focused on “smaller things,” he told The Logic following a meeting of the House of Commons science and research committee on Thursday. The new Canadian Innovation and Investment Agency “is going to be really in that bracket where we need to have additional funding to support commercialization.”

The backstory: The Liberals first introduced the idea of a new agency in their summer 2021 election platform, modelling the proposal on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was going to be a “moonshot approach to science and innovation,” Champagne told The Logic that December, noting he was “a big believer that this is something that is missing currently in the ecosystem.”

The government formally debuted the agency in the April 2022 budget, allocating $1 billion over five years starting in the current fiscal year. But it dropped the DARPA model to focus higher up the innovation chain, promising to inject R&D into traditional sectors to address the country’s long-standing commercialization deficit. 

“When you’re looking at how Canada can lead, it’s not just fundamental [and] applied research,” Champagne said Thursday. “It’s how you transform that into a service and a product, and that’s what the innovation agency is going to do.” 

Some private-sector stakeholders have expressed concern the new agency will simply duplicate existing innovation programs, and won’t do enough to ensure Canadian-made ideas turn into IP and profits. Two sources with knowledge of the consultations mounted by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and Finance Canada, the co-leads on the file, said the plan officials described seemed to overlap significantly with other business-support schemes. 

Champagne’s comments Thursday slot the agency between the SIF, which provides financing of $10-million minimum to scale-up and industrial projects, and IRAP, which makes awards below that threshold for small firms to pay for R&D.

What’s next: The November 2022 fall economic statement promised the government would publish a blueprint for the new agency in “the coming weeks.” It’s now been 13.

“We’re working diligently with our colleagues at Finance to put that in place,” Champagne said Thursday. “We have already taken steps. It’s a new agency, but we have a plan to deliver that as quickly as possible because we understand this is key for us to win.”