Canada's research universities are central to the country's ability to advance its innovation capacity.

Fifteen of the leading research-intensive universities collectively attract more than $7B annually from industry and government sources, creating a robust foundation for impactful research.

If we're to fully harness this potential, we'd be wise to adopt a collaborative "Team Canada" approach, maximizing our collective resources to drive job creation, skills development, and sustainable progress.

When investments are strategically coordinated across our institutions, their collective power is magnified to generate breakthroughs. This not only strengthens Canada's competitive edge but also ensures that research funding creates positive, far-reaching impacts across the country.

A "Team Canada" approach can ensure coordination across local, regional, and national levels. We need only to look at the CFI's Core Research Platforms strategy to know that this kind of formula can help to reduce duplication and promote shared access of publicly funded equipment well beyond the institutions that house them.

An overarching infrastructure management system would maximize and optimize uptime and usage of our state-of-the art equipment, devices and technologies. Such efficiencies would benefit our partners in industry, providing them greater access to our infrastructure when it's not being used by researchers, enhancing their global competitiveness.

This approach would help maximize the return on investment for our federal and provincial partners to help drive local, regional and national socioeconomic priorities.

A clear purpose: economic and social value for Canadians
To capture the full economic and social value of our research investments, we need to maximize impact - aiming to generate the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. A "Team Canada" approach enables us to streamline resources, amplify outcomes, and ensure that investments continue to produce meaningful benefits to people and the planet.

Let's focus on supporting the most innovative ideas and collaborations with the greatest potential to address urgent challenges. By empowering our researchers in this way, we can ensure that Canadian research produces solutions with impact to address issues at home and around the world.

With a "team" approach, Canada's universities can deliver high-impact research that benefits all Canadians while ensuring a strong return on public investment. For this vision to succeed, we need a funding framework that strikes a balance between curiosity-driven exploration and mission-focused initiatives, creating a pathway for consistent and meaningful research outcomes.

Our research-intensive universities are central to developing vibrant innovation ecosystems across various regions and sectors. By fostering a concentration of expertise across diverse disciplines, they not only attract industrial partners eager to innovate but also drive innovation through licensing and commercialization of university-led research.

This dual role of being both a resource and a partner in innovation is key to regional economic growth. We're realizing those benefits in our own region at the McMaster Innovation Park - an incubation hub for startups, spinoffs and scaling companies.

Through a unified, "Team Canada" approach, we'll create a dynamic research landscape that advances our social and economic priorities, promotes a healthy return on investment and sets a global standard for research impact.