Other Projects

Building on past successes assists the NCIT with future plans. At its inception, the July 1999 report from the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) evaluation committee that approved the capital grant for the founding NCIT project noted that “long-range research often implies gambling on the intuition and activity of the researcher to provide the direction of the research. We caution NCIT not to have too rigid a research management structure, to allow exciting new ideas to bubble up from below, not to direct too much from the top”.

Responsive, value-added research management is what the NCIT has been about since its inception, staying relevant to our partner’s needs through the most dynamic and unpredictable times in the history of the ICT sector. The NCIT partnerships with industry and government have grown from a few traditional players to more than fifty organizations including start-ups, SME and major multi-nationals, federal, provincial and most recently municipal levels of government.

Today the focus of the NCIT-managed research has evolved from ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) to embrace services and applications that contribute to the productivity of many sectors of our economy enabled by advances achieved through ICT research. Through our management of the Ontario Research Network in Electronic Commerce we have developed a particular focus on the rapidly emerging area of service sector innovation. The NCIT partnerships evolved from a technology-centric approach to a multi-disciplinary approach that blends technology with legal and policy issues, business and psychology to reflect fundamental changes in the economy and the evolution of the information society across the OECD.

The future of the NCIT will be defined by how it will continue to change to ensure that it provides the best value to its members and research partners:

• To manage broadly-based multi-party research projects emphasizing the unique characteristics of the National Capital technology cluster will certainly continue to make up an important part of our activity. These projects are likely to be more focused and results driven while preserving the opportunities for discovery and invention, reflecting the changing emphasis of the funding agencies that support these kinds of projects.
• To complement this activity the NCIT will increasingly pursue opportunities to extract value from the research activities by building partnerships and competing for new funding sources in Canada and abroad
• Finally the NCIT will build on its accumulated expertise in establishing both public and private sector research partnerships particularly in the services sector to help evolve the research funding and management model to better reflect the needs of NCIT members through primary research and data collection.

The core competency and distinguishing feature of the NCIT will remain as “high-touch” networking to enable understanding and responding to the needs of each of our  members in order to identify opportunities that otherwise may be overlooked and following through on them to improve the likelihood of success.