OTTAWA — Canadian academics are drawing inspiration from Israeli research models. Israel’s top policy experts and heads of higher learning gathered on Oct. 27 in Ottawa for a three-day conference on innovation.
The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) hosted the delegation alongside Canadian university presidents, health-care specialists and technology leaders who together examined Israel’s approaches to funding, collaboration and the general will to foster innovation in academic settings.
Tel Aviv University (TAU) president Joseph Klafter addressed the school’s endorsement of research on all fronts, some of which accounts for Tel Aviv’s status as a high-tech hotbed, second only to San Francisco insofar as innovation goes. “We have a tremendous openness towards audacious and even crazy combinations of ideas and a readiness to climb over all fences in all disciplines,” said Klafter.
Among the combinations endorsed by TAU are interdisciplinary studies, merging fields as diverse as film, mathematics, East Asian studies, linguistics and biology. This co-operative take on education is reflected at the faculty level. Currently, the school’s Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology is conducting research with 70 groups from over 20 departments.
At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, collaboration is also prominent. President Rivka Carmi focused on strategies pairing Israeli research with international partnerships. Known as Israel’s “start-up university,” BGU is involved in academic coalitions with the University of Chicago, Dalhousie University, the University of Michigan and the University of Cincinnati.
BGU students are urged to take part in the school’s collaborative culture. Each year, business and engineering students participate in an innovation fair that displays their work. Attendees often include public figures, bankers and potential investors. The event has spurred the development of projects such as the Hydro-Camel, Israel’s first autonomous underwater submarine.
For Carmi, such gatherings are as beneficial to students as they are to Israel’s top companies. “The students are exposed to the scrutiny of the real world, and the industry is exposed to some very unique and very interesting ideas,” Carmi said.
Ruth Arnon, president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, furthered Carmi’s sentiments. According to Arnon, students should begin experimenting with entrepreneurship in the fourth grade.
In Canada, leaders in academia are more critical of college and university projects, especially where risk may be involved. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research president Alain Beaudet spoke to this skepticism, which is often a determining factor during the peer review of breakout research.
“Peer reviewers will tend to favour more secure, incremental research rather than going for exciting projects that could hold great potential… they’re afraid of making mistakes, so they fund the best bet,” he said.
He went on to reference Barry Marshall, who in 1982 discovered that peptic ulcers were caused by a treatable bacterial infection. Although funding bodies initially dismissed Marshall’s theory, he later won the 2005 Nobel Prize in physiology. The story illustrates the disconnect between imaginative research and conservative funding, and Beaudet called for greater support of Canadian creativity in the domains of science, technology and innovation.
The AUCC is already moving in this creative direction, in association with Israel. In 2013, it signed a five-year memorandum with Israel’s Association of University Heads. The agreement aims to enhance academic partnerships between Canada and Israel in an assortment of sectors, including waste management, medicine, solar power, renewable energy, biotechnology and water technology.
AUCC president Paul Davidson highlighted the importance of timing as Canada continues to deepen its relationships with Israeli universities. “There is tremendous opportunity facing Canada as we return to fiscal surplus and as we engage in the world more broadly,” he said.