TVB Associates Inc is pleased to have supported Neutrons Canada in showcasing the real and potental impacts from neutron beams. Its website shows how socio-economic returns to Canada have been more than triple the investment the nation has invested, and these returns are to areas of national priorities, such as independence and reliability of our energy systems and lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Client site: https://neutrons.ca/#impacts
Over the past year, TVB Associates has been pleased to support the Canadian synchrotron community in the development of a Long-Range Plan (LRP). This continuing multi-year consultative project is driven by the Canadian Institute for Synchrotron Radiation and the Canadian Light Source (CLS).
The LRP was formally launched at the CLS Annual Users’ Meeting at the University of Waterloo in October 2024. A series of three virtual consultation sessions were held in May and June 2025. Users across industry and universities participated in answering a set of consultative questions, and a formal survey was launched.
TVB Associates has been centrally involved in planning and organizing this LRP project.
Client website: https://www.cisr-icrs.ca/lrp
TVB Associates is pleased to have supported the Canadian neutron beam community and Neutrons Canada in the strategy, planning, writing and production of the Canadian Neutron Long-Range Plan for 2025 to 2035.
The Plan outlines the path to maximize impacts in clean energy and the environment, safety and security, health and food security, and quantum innovation, through research using neutron beams.
Client article: https://neutrons.ca/news-item/release-of-the-canadian-neutron-long-range-plan-for-2025-to-2035/
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.
Client article: https://neutrons.ca/news-item/lrp-mcmaster/
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.
For more information about the Neutron Long-Range Plan, visit: https://neutrons.ca/lrp2025/
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.
Core facilities are often challenged to cover the costs of essential, highly qualified scientific and technical staff when relying primarily on limited funds from within the university. Inadequate support may be one reason core facilities have been less successful in attracting further investment through the CFI Innovation Fund.
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.
Author: Daniel Banks, President, TVB Associates Inc.
Originally published: Canadian Association of Research Administrators (June 21, 2021)
Image: Canada Foundation for Innovation. “2020 Innovation Fund: By the Numbers.”
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:
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.