What do a global satellite communications corporation, a crop nutrients and fertilizer company and an agriculture college have in common?
For Canada’s MDA, Agrium and Olds College, all have something significant to contribute through innovation to the way Canadians enjoy the food they eat and the various products exported beyond our borders -- from even before it’s planted to the time it arrives on consumers’ plates.
The three are among the diverse groups and individuals joining forces to accelerate agrifood innovation efforts through a unique collaboration framework. The initiative is intended to better harness the effects of innovation investment working collectively between industry, government and researchers. It’s also unique in that it is intended to create a pan-Canadian platform to help the sector’s diverse, and sometimes disparate, “silos” align more coherently to identify and resolve challenges in the agrifood value chain.
While the Smart Agri-Food Super Cluster (SASC) is administered from the Calgary region, it encompasses partners across Canada, recently wrapped several weeks of intense collaboration to pull together a proposal for the federal government’s innovation supercluster program. The program, announced in the March budget, created a $950-million fund to which groups across the country have submitted “letters of intent” describing their various approaches to innovation.
SASC steering committee members approached innovation from a systems perspective, in order to create a Canada-wide platform to help link together key nodes and expertise in the country’s agrifood value chain, noted committee chair Bill Whitelaw.
“We felt it important to create something that constructively brings together all the players that comprise the ways we do farming and food,” he noted. “Our approach is intended to resolve some of the fragmentation dynamics that often hinder innovation efforts. Even as part of our proposal process, we had wonderful conversations with other cluster initiatives.”
The supercluster concept, already used in the United Kingdom and Europe, is intended to help Canada develop more effective approaches to innovation by identifying and working through “pinch points” and bottlenecks that currently impair efficiency, added Whitelaw.
The federal government’s supercluster policy thrust is a direct result of guidance supplied to the federal cabinet from an external economic advisory council created to suggest ways of rethinking various aspects of the Canadian economy to help the country remain competitive globally. The supercluster program is administered by the federal Innovation, Science and Economic Development department. Groups from across the economy submitted intent letters mid-summer. Preliminary announcements as to which groups will be selected are expected sometime in the fall.
SASC’s “platform approach” is intended to accommodate innovation efforts in cropping, livestock, digital and agrifood processing technologies. Via those pillars, it also seeks to link companies, not-for-profits, research organizations and post-secondary institutions from coast to coast in a way that creates new employment, global export opportunities and safer and more sustainable food production. If invited to the program’s full proposal stages, the pillars will be the basis on which specific projects are initiated, Whitelaw noted.
“Ottawa would like to see innovation as the driving force that significantly improves Canada’s already strong ag and food leadership position globally,” said Whitelaw. “Moving the country upward in global export rankings could create billions of new economic impact.”
