TVB Associates was pleased to support Neutrons Canada and the Long-Range Plan (LRP) Panel in project-managing and implementing a two-year consensus-building consultative process to produce the Canadian Neutron Long-Range Plan for 2025 to 2035.
As the final consultative event in the LRP process, TVB Associates supported Neutrons Canada to gather the Canadian neutron beam user community with leaders from nine of the brightest neutron sources in the U.S. and Europe, who were vying for a partnership with Canada.
The meeting revealed broad support for the overarching recommendation of the LRP Panel for a national program for infrastructure for research and development with neutron beams.
The LRP, to be released in the coming months, calls on the federal government to allocate funds reaching about $25M/year for a national neutron beam program to be managed by Neutrons Canada. The expected scale and complexity of this program will place Neutrons Canada within among Canada’s portfolio of Major Research Facilities.
As project manager of the on-going process to develop the Canadian Neutron Long-Range Plan for 2025 to 2035, TVB Associates was pleased to support the organization of a consensus building session at the CINS Science Conference in March 2023, in cooperation with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
The session, entitled “Building Expertise for Canadian Neutron Scattering”, gathered input on topics such as EDI, indigenous issues, student and post-doc issues, outreach to industry, and attraction of experts for roles such as instrument scientists.
The outcomes of the session will feed into the development of the Neutrons Long-Range Plan.
TVB Associates is continuing in the role of project manager of the Neutrons Long-Range Plan, now directly supporting Neutrons Canada to act in its new role as the institutional steward of the Neutrons Long-Range Plan.
Many universities are developing “core facilities”—i.e., research infrastructure that is open to researchers from across the university and that may be available to outside users as well. Operating core facilities so a wide range of researchers can access specialized research tools is a way to maximize usage of, and potential impact from, infrastructure that often represents millions of dollars in capital.
Author: Daniel Banks, President, TVB Associates Inc. Originally published: Canadian Association of Research Administrators (Nov 1, 2021) Image: Medical radiation technologist examines MRI results. (shutterstock)
To ensure that core facilities can be used effectively by a range of researchers, core facilities need to be supported by highly qualified staff. This is a key difference from other labs that serve only one or a few research groups that specialize in the techniques available in these labs.
Attempts to rely on the part-time efforts of students—a group with a rapid turnover rate—are often not effective to maximize the use of core facilities. I experienced this ineffectiveness firsthand as a graduate student when I received some pointers on how to use a new apparatus from a professor and a student who had used it only once or twice themselves. After several unsuccessful attempts to produce meaningful results, some other students and I diverted our efforts more productively elsewhere. The apparatus, valued at around $500,000, had been funded as part of a multimillion-dollar grant to purchase a set of equipment that, if operated collectively as a core facility, could have been a tremendously valuable resource to students and faculty researchers from several departments in the university. How different would my student experience have been if this apparatus had been offered as part of a “core facility” that had even one technician who was an expert in its operation?
Research infrastructure is sometimes compared to roads, which are built to benefit a wide range of users, from commuters to emergency services. Similarly, research infrastructure is funded by governments so users can conduct research and generate knowledge that will benefit all of society. However, the roads analogy falls short when it suggests that governments can fund research infrastructure once, and then leave it alone with little to no concern for its ongoing operation. This is simply not the case.
Research infrastructure requires expert staff to make sure that users can take full advantage of the research tools on offer. In this respect, research infrastructure is less like roads and more like the medical diagnostic imaging facilities that host MRI machines and CT scanners. These centralized medical facilities are supported by highly trained specialists who aid in the diagnosis of patients by operating the equipment, helping to interpret the results, and providing other essential services like ensuring the equipment is maintained in a state of readiness. Without these trained specialists, the “users” who order the tests (e.g., family doctors and surgeons) cannot effectively diagnose and treat patient illness and disease.
What if governments took a “fund it once and then leave it to the users” approach to MRI machines and CT scanners? That is, what if family doctors and surgeons were left to operate this highly specialized equipment on their own? Would that be a good use of their time? Most likely, fewer patients would be diagnosed due to doctors’ time constraints. One can also imagine an increase in failed diagnostic tests or wrongly interpreted results. Certainly, the health of patients would suffer.
Universities’ core research facilities can be even more complicated to operate and maintain than medical diagnostic facilities—and a “fund it once and then leave it to the users” approach is just as ineffective. The faculty researchers who use a core facility are often not experts in the facility’s equipment. These professors and their students would therefore produce more and better results if the core facility was supported with appropriate expertise.
Core facilities lie midway between a single-professor lab and a large-scale national laboratory, such as Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, SNOLAB, the Canadian Light Source, or Canada’s National Design Network. Large-scale research infrastructure requires many scientific and engineering experts to maintain the state-of-the-art equipment, develop new applications of the infrastructure, and foster a community of researchers who can fully exploit the facility to advance Canadian research priorities. The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) acknowledges the need for in-house expertise and provides funding for this purpose through its Major Science Initiatives (MSI) Fund—but this fund is only for large-scale facilities.
Clearly, there is a role for a research funding mechanism to support the operations of mid-sized core research facilities. With the CFI receiving stable funding beginning in 2023, the door may be open to such a program.
In the meantime, universities may need to make the difficult decision to fully fund their core research facilities’ operations themselves. Those that get ahead of the game by proactively providing their core facilities with adequate staff now will be better able to compete for operating funds in the future when such a competition becomes available. Indeed, facilities that do invest now will be more successful because they will have higher usage rates and higher numbers of successful experiments. What’s more, over time, they will build a stronger track record of research impact.
Consolidating research infrastructure into national facilities that support large user communities can be an effective use of resources and can enable scientific progress that is often not possible using smaller local facilities (generally referred to as “core” facilities). National facilities play a major role in facilitating cooperation among their user communities, leading to greater coherence as they present opportunities for research investment to funding agencies.
Research communities, such as subatomic physics or astronomy, that collectively prioritize their projects in a strategic or long-range plan are more successful in funding competitions. Projects that have already been evaluated by their communities for importance and feasibility are likely to have high merit—and are likely to appear to have high merit to a reviewer.
Strategic plans can also help secure funding opportunities beyond calls for funding proposals. If a government decision-maker is considering a direct investment in project A, she doesn’t want to be surprised later by a request to fund competing project B, which she didn’t know about. When government decision-makers know that an entire scientific community has agreed on the request, they don’t have to worry about juggling competing requests.
National facilities often play a critical role in enabling the strategic or long-range planning initiatives of a research community. National facilities bring professional perspectives that are complementary to those of their users. Furthermore, they often supply financial and logistical resources for these planning processes. In fact, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) expects all national facilities it funds to have strategic plans already in place because strategic planning for major research facilities is an important part of good governance. Costs associated with hosting planning sessions and meetings to consult stakeholders, hiring consultants for strategic planning purposes, and conducting related communications and outreach activities are all eligible expenses under the CFI Major Science Initiatives Fund.
The support that national facilities provide to the strategic work of the community continues into the development of project ideas and corresponding funding applications. For large applications—proposals to the CFI Innovation Fund, for example—such assistance to develop an application can be invaluable. And the CFI funding data shows this value: In the CFI 2020 Innovation Fund, funding proposals in support of a national facility had a success rate of 47%, compared to the average of 35% (see figure above). Only 28% of proposals from core facilities were successful.
Proposals for research infrastructure that are “in support of” a national facility are typically for infrastructure that the national facility has agreed to host or operate. These proposals in turn will naturally be supported by the facility. For instance, the facility may employ the time of professionals to support communications and outreach to project stakeholders. It may draw on its network of users and partners to help build a strong and diverse project team. It may bring expertise in management and operations to demonstrate the sustainability of a project and a track record of delivering benefits from similar projects. It may also offer support to the applicant team in terms of proposal writing and project management expertise to ease their administrative burden.
In short, proposals in support of national facilities are more successful at securing funding, in part because national facilities help maintain coherence among a broad user community via strategic planning processes, and because these larger facilities provide specialized professional resources to complement the scientific expertise of the applicants.
If you, as a research administrator, are evaluating proposals to support with CFI institutional envelope, consider putting some of your support behind proposals that are part of a coherent national strategy for a research field, and that are being developed with professional support from national facilities. The data shows that this is an effective strategy and will allow you to leverage the substantial investments in these national facilities.
Do you want to ensure maximum returns on large public investments in research? Improving governance through strategic planning can offer you a boost in performance.
Author: Daniel Banks, President, TVB Associates Inc. Originally published: Canadian Science Policy Centre (Jan. 4, 2021)
Good governance is of vital importance for the long-term success and sustainability of large-scale national research facilities and initiatives. This fact was recently underscored by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) through its Major Science Initiatives (MSI) Fund for the 2012–2017 cycle. The CFI promoted the improvement of governance through the implementation of strategic planning processes.
The facilities whose operations were funded through the CFI’s MSI Fund for this period included national research infrastructure such as Compute Canada, the Canadian Light Source, SNOLAB, and the Canadian research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, as well as some smaller facilities of national significance such as the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy. Such national research facilities such as these have typically ‘grown up’ in an ad hoc manner over time—and their governance and management structures and approaches to planning have evolved in a similarly ad hoc manner.
As part of promoting the adoption of best practices in governance and management, the CFI’s MSI Fund for 2012–2017 required all recipient facilities to conduct strategic planning processes that focused on looking ahead to the long term and developing actionable strategies. Afterwards, the CFI reported on the positive impacts on the overall performance of the facilities in the group in its 2019 publication, “A report on the advancement of research facilities funded between 2012 and 2017”.
The positive impacts of strategic planning on the governance of national research facilities should come as no surprise to anyone involved in Canada’s research community. Strategic planning helps align all its activities with the mission to support its long-term objectives. One main outcome of strategic planning, the performance measurement framework, keeps all organizational activities aligned with the strategy and alerts management and the Board of Directors when action is needed. Additionally, the process of developing a strategic plan frequently leads to the identification of areas for strategic and operational enhancements.
In addition to enabling such improvements in governance, the strategic planning process helps build a community of users and stakeholders around the facility or initiative. The strategic plan can also be used as a key communications piece for government bodies, potential collaborators, and local communities.
Making the Strategic Planning Process Work for You
The strategic planning process often falls to facility managers, senior scientists, and even communications staff—often people who would rather be working in a laboratory, or writing a good news press release. If your facility or initiative has turned to you to help update its strategic plan (the next CFI MSI Fund cycle is fast approaching), don’t look at it as an administrative burden or imposition. Rather, see it as an opportunity for you to maximize your facility’s impact and engage wholeheartedly in the process.
Here are some tips and good practices to consider:
Start by designing an inclusive consultation process. Identify all of your stakeholder groups across Canada. Ask key representatives of these groups to be part of a steering committee to help design the consultative process for the strategic plan. Ensure there is a diversity of perspectives. Identify your internal resources; in particular, ensure the engagement of your executive leadership and Board of Directors. It will also be essential to include your scientific and technical professionals to complement external views.
Get the resources you need. Ensure there is an adequate budget for the consultation and production of the plan. The consultative processes will require a significant investment of personnel time, even if done virtually using inexpensive video conferencing and survey platforms. Ensure everyone understands the time commitment that will be expected of them. Do you have a writer on your team with the skills, experience, and time to produce high-level documents for science funding bodies? (Keep in mind, this challenge is quite different from writing grant applications and most other communications pieces). If the required expertise is not available in-house, you may be able to enlist the help of a consultant for such a project, if you plan ahead and budget sufficient resources.
Position your facility or initiative within the national and global context. Effective strategy in business requires targeting the most appropriate market segment for maximum competitive advantage. Similarly, science facilities and initiatives should choose where they can make the most impact in terms of the global ‘market’ for research. Canada’s science funders are often looking to enhance cooperation across the country to maximize the collective national impact, rather than support overlapping programs that compete to produce similar outcomes. How can you complement and collaborate with similar research programs or capabilities across Canada and around the world to be more effective? What advantages do you have, or can you acquire, to become a world-class facility or initiative capable of making the greatest possible impact?
Allow your scientists to remain engaged in what they do best; leave program management and operational details toprofessionals in these areas. Consultative engagement with scientists should focus on scientific themes and opportunities for the future. Scientists should also be invited to identify any challenges they are facing, which may include operational matters and problems that are hindering research. Refer solutions to operational problems to the appropriate professionals, rather than bog down the strategy discussion in such details.
Learn from others’ strategic planning experiences. Each facility or initiative is unique, but there are frequently recurring goals. For example, all of the MSI-funded facilities in the 2012–2017 cycle had strategic goals in the following areas: enabling leading-edge science and providing state-of-the-art research capabilities through their infrastructure; reaching a wide community of scientific users; and training highly qualified personnel. Many also had goals related to the following: offering top-quality services; enhancing international reputation; being responsive to the needs of non-academic interests, such as industry, health, and security; enhancing the efficiency of operations; and achieving sustainability. Which of these are strategic for your facility or initiative?
Use your strategic plan to ‘sell’ your facility or initiative. If written well, your strategic plan can be an effective communications piece to be perused by government analysts and other stakeholders seeking to learn about what you do. Don’t miss the chance to include information about your facility’s realized and potential impacts in your strategic plan. Celebrate your past successes, and help others get excited about the cutting-edge work taking place at your facility. If this is done successfully, your strategic plan can be a tool for building widespread support. You can encourage members of your scientific community to share your plan with their home institutions, and even with their MPs, to help others communicate key messages about your facility’s work and impact. Your strategic plan can also be shared to engage the support of your local community and to forge collaborations with your international counterparts.
Designing an effective strategic planning process for an existing facility or initiative is a great way to start improving its governance. With a well-crafted strategic plan in place, the Board of Directors or other oversight body can hold management accountable for follow-up actions. The results should lead to both strategic and operational improvements that increase your facility or initiative’s performance, and ultimately increase returns on the public investment.
Demonstrating socioeconomic impact from the training HQP in research has always been difficult, because of challenges associated with tracking graduates and following their subsequent educational and professional careers over time.
The emergence of career-oriented social networking, however, has provided valuable tools that can be used for this purpose. The value of any social network depends greatly on its number of users. The biggest career-oriented network, LinkedIn, has seen a surge in usage since Microsoft took it over in 2016, and its user base is now over 600 million — about 20% of the estimated 3 billion people working in 70 million companies around the world.
Many HQP provide their career information on LinkedIn
The beauty of LinkedIn for tracking HQP is that individuals openly volunteer career information that would otherwise be confidential and very difficult to get. A high proportion of HQP in North America have LinkedIn profiles or can be otherwise identified online, and this includes professionals of all ages. For example, in 2018, I performed internet searches for former students and post-docs who used the now-closed Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC) for research as part of their graduate or undergraduate programs at Canadian universities, going back as far 1984. I found 75% of these alumni online, and nearly 60% on LinkedIn. Furthermore, 44% of LinkedIn users are women, which is similar to the proportion of women in the workforce overall, suggesting there is little gender-bias in the data, at least at a very high level (however, there can be difficulty in identifying individuals, often women, who have changed their surname).
LinkedIn data reveals where alumni are working now
Some of the simplest results to obtain are the institutions where alumni are working now. For the study for the CNBC, for example, showed that almost 80% of the alumni were working in the sectors that contribute most directly to Canadian innovation: manufacturing, higher education, and professional and technical services. Furthermore, a higher proportion of CNBC alumni with PhDs were working in industry (65%) over academia, as compared to the average for natural sciences PhDs in Canada (51% half stay in academia, according to StatsCan data).
LinkedIn data reveals individual educational and professional paths
LinkedIn data is especially useful for observing alumni’s educational and professional paths over time, because most users treat their profiles like an online resume, listing their record of degrees and professional positions. Such longitudinal data was essential to obtaining valuable insights in the study for the CNBC, such as:
Participation in research at the CNBC as an undergraduate student was a strong predictor of earning a graduate degree: Of the undergraduate students who came to the CNBC for a research project, 60% went on to achieve a graduate degree. In fact, most of these alumni went beyond a single Master’s degree: 40% of the undergraduate students later achieved a PhD, and another 14% earned two Master’s degrees. These rates of academic achievement are far higher than is typical for Canada as a whole: According to StatsCan data, only 44% of all undergraduate students in Canada who are surveyed upon graduation stated intention to pursue further education of any kind. The percentage of students who attain higher degrees is, of course, much lower than those who intended to do so.
Figure 1 Highest degree attained by undergraduate and Master’s students who came to the CNBC for a research project (Data source: LinkedIn). “All Canada” data is the fraction of recent graduates who say they intend to pursue further education of any kind (StatsCan).
Participants in research at the CNBC have enjoyed subsequent career progression: The LinkedIn data showed that alumni with greater years of experience tended to fill more senior positions, while more recently graduated alumni have a greater share of non-supervisory positions.
Figure 2 The level of seniority of the most recent employment positions attained by CNBC student alumni as a function of the number of years that have passed since they attended the CNBC (Data source: LinkedIn).
In the case of the CNBC study, a sample of alumni were contacted via LinkedIn and interviewed. Alumni interviewed attributed their experience of doing research at the CNBC with motivating them to pursue research and development or related technical careers in industry and with helping them develop skills that have helped them in their careers. While not scientifically conclusive, the interview results provide evidence for interpreting some causation in the above observations.
Why aren’t more institutions using LinkedIn data to demonstrate impact from training HQP?
Despite the potential that LinkedIn data holds, I have seen few studies that seek to use the data to full advantage. A notable exception is the 10,000 PhDs project, in which the University of Toronto made a significant investment of effort to identify 88% of its PhD graduates from 2000-2015 online. Many of these alumni were found on LinkedIn. The U of T study analyzed their first and current employment statuses. That study provided valuable insights into employment prospects after earning a PhD, and how that employment differs across fields of study.
Perhaps LinkedIn data has not been used to its full potential because several years ago, its utility for such studies was not as great due to lower usage levels, and one could have reasonably questioned its long-term viability as a platform. But the activity on LinkedIn has greatly increased in recent years and it must now be taken seriously.
Other issues could relate to interpreting the data, data privacy, or the labor required to gather and analyze the data. These issues are discussed next.
Benchmarking to aid data interpretation
A typical challenge in demonstrating impact from training HQP is a lack of reference points to know if the results are excellent or below average. If one believes the results will be ambiguous, then there is less motivation to pursue the analysis.
The key to resolving the ambiguity is to determine appropriate benchmarks and build them into the study. Sometimes the data can be compared with insights from other sources, such as StatsCan as I have done in some of the above examples, to assist with the interpretation. Another option is to conduct the same analyses on random samples of comparator groups (e.g. students who were not involved in research, or were from other institutions distributed across Canada). A comparator group would be useful to interpret the above data on CNBC alumni career progression, for example.
Data privacy
Although LinkedIn users volunteer their career information online, there are still data privacy issues to be considered in collecting and storing the information. LinkedIn users retain the right to remove their data from the site. Systematic duplication of their data by third parties increases the possibility of leakage, which in turn undermines their control over their data.
The U of T study reported that student researchers who conducted the online searches were trained on confidentiality. They entered the data they found into secure servers, at which point they no longer had access to the data. None of the data was stored on personal computers at any time.
With reasonable precautions such as these, data privacy issues need not be a barrier to using the LinkedIn data.
Labor to gather and analyse the data
The labor to gather and analyze the data is perhaps the biggest barrier to using LinkedIn data to its full potential. Few professionals at institutions have time to find large samples of alumni and manually input data from websites into a spreadsheet or database. Longitudinal analyses and benchmarking multiply the amount of data to be found and processed.
The U of T study overcame the labor barrier by using inexpensive part-time student researchers. It reported a $50,000 budget for a team to do the searches and data entry over an 8-month period. The value of staff time to perform subsequent analysis on the data and publish the results can be assumed to be in addition to this budget.
There are also smart ways of automating much of the searching, data entry and data analysis. For the CNBC study, I was fortunate to partner with a consulting firm that had a knack for writing scripts for these purposes. These scripts were key to obtaining results at a reasonable cost.
Furthermore, narrowing the scope of the study to the HQP trained by one or more strategic research facilities at a university can be useful to reduce costs compared to examining the HQP trained by an entire university.
Conclusion and questions for further discussion
The usefulness of LinkedIn as a source of data for demonstrating impact from training HQP has greatly increased in recent years. Research institutions are just beginning realize its potential.
Are you thinking about how to show the value of training HQP in research? What kinds of messages would you like to be able to communicate to governments and research granting agencies, but don’t yet have the evidence to support them? Are you gathering evidence of impact from a major research facility to support its upcoming funding renewal?
Have you been involved in studies using LinkedIn or using general online searches to find and your research alumni? What lessons have you learned? What are your current practices to benchmark the data, respect data privacy, or manage costs?
