Innovation Anthology #581:
Instead of retiring in 2010 when the Alberta Research Council morphed into what’s now called Alberta Innovates Technology Future, John McDougall took up a new challenge.
He’s now president of the National Research Council.
With a mandate for change, John McDougall first looked at how Canada’s largest research and innovation agency is organized.
JOHN MCDOUGALL: Well the way it was working was as a very researcher driven kind of a place. The mandate of the NRC is really for economic development in Canada, by working on issues that are of strategic importance to the country, and to help grow the industries through technology. And what was happening was that the organization had become sort of a collection of entitites that wasn’t really strategically managed, So there wasn’t a lot of integration of the capabilities, with facilities all over the country that kind of did their own thing.
So it was really an organization that wasn’t taking advantage of the critical mass that it could have and put together.
John McDougall’s next step in revitalizing the NRC involved an analysis of research organizations around the globe.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Program Date: 2013-11-07