Dr. Stephen Lucas, PhD (photo at right), was appointed CEO of Vancouver-based Mitacs in October 2024, after more than 35 years as a public servant with the Government of Canada.

His government roles included 10 years as a deputy minister with Health Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada, as well as senior roles at the Privy Council Office and with Natural Resources Canada.

Along the Public Health Agency of Canada, Lucas led the federal government’s comprehensive health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in collaboration with federal, provincial, territorial, and Indigenous partners, scientific experts, local health and community organizations and the private sector – including the largest vaccination campaign in Canada’s history.

He also led work on the development and adoption of the 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, Canada’s first national climate plan, with the provinces and territories.

Lucas started his career as a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada.

Mitacs (originally standing for Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems, before Mitacs expanded), is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1999.

Mitacs is Canada’s innovation organization that connects businesses and researchers with access to talent, financial support and partnerships needed to turn ideas into impactful innovations.

Since 2018, Mitacs has:

• invested $1.4 billion+ in R&D.
• funded 100,000+ internships across 36,000 innovation projects.
• invested in 47,000+ interns (depending on the program, one intern can have multiple four-to-six-month internships; hence the number of internships being different than number of interns)
• partnered with 11,000+ enterprises.
• partnered with 198 postsecondary institutions across Canada.
• provided skills training opportunities for 24,000 students (these are students who participated in the Mitacs Training initiative, a series of free professional development courses open to postsecondary students and recent grads in Canada and Mitacs program participants).
• hosted 12,400+ international students (these are interns who came to Canada through on of Mitacs’ international programs).

According to a recent Statistics Canada report, Mitacs-supported companies:

• Experienced an 11-percent boost in productivity, a nine-percent increase in revenue, and a 16-percent rise in sales over three years.
• Increased their R&D spending by 37 percent seven years after partnering with Mitacs, while  companies that didn’t collaborate with Mitacs decreased their R&D spending by 54 percent.
• Experienced a steady increase of 18 percent in employment levels over seven years, while companies not supported by Mitacs saw a reduction of five percent.

Lucas talked with Mark Lowey, Research Money’s managing editor, about why he joined Mitacs and the expertise he brings to the organization, his immediate goals for Mitacs, his thoughts on the Walport Report on the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, how Mitacs is supporting Indigenous training, and how Mitacs can help Canada retain highly qualified personnel and enhance collaboration between academia, industry and government.

R$:  What motivated you to join Mitacs after serving for nearly four decades with the Government of Canada?

SL:  Indeed I had a long career in the government, in the last 10 years as deputy minister which was extraordinarily fulfilling and challenging. After five years in particular as deputy minister of Health Canada through the [COVID-19] pandemic, I thought it was time to take my retirement and pass the torch to the wonderful people in the public service. In doing that, I’d always intended to pursue my next career, having energy and enthusiasm and commitment to public service. That really is the core of “Why Mitacs?” I was looking for an opportunity to work for an organization that had purpose and meaning, that was consistent with my values and commitment to serving the public in terms of the interests of Canada and Canadians, working in an environment that would bring me to work on issues of importance to our country. And in particular, an opportunity to work with and across sectors.

Fundamentally I spent much of my career, although in government, working closely with the business community in a variety of roles and with researchers and academic organizations. I started my career as a researcher in terms of my scientific research and believed that this multi-sector and indeed interdisciplinary approach [and] intersectoral approach is so critical to taking on the challenges we face, whether they’re economic, societal or environmental. These factors came together when the opportunity for Mitacs came along and I was thrilled to have been considered and then appointed by the board to the role of CEO.

R$:  Which of the research and training priority areas that Mitacs invests in do you think could most benefit from your expertise, and why?

SL:  I think the starting point is just to reflect on the Mitacs model, which is part of what attracted me. [That’s] part of what I think makes Mitacs unique and part of where I think I can add some value in my role of CEO. What’s extraordinary about the Mitacs model is that it works in the zone between business need – or organizational need more broadly because we support internships in the health sector, for example – and a willingness by those organizations [and] those businesses to invest in talent and research.

Second, [the Mitacs model] requires as part of the partnership a researcher. It could be a single researcher, it could be a consortium of researchers in universities, colleges, polytechnics.

And third and most important, [the model] enables this transfer of research and knowledge to the business that’s willing to invest through advanced skilled talent, specifically graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and more recently undergraduate and college or polytechnic students.

So bringing these elements together in terms of the magic of a mechanism that not only transfers research, not only creates a work-integrated opportunity for the students, not only supports further business investment in talent and research, but bringing them together has had impact. It’s had impact through work we’ve done with Statistics Canada that shows firms working with Mitacs are more productive – 11 percent better than firms that don’t work with Mitacs. They grow faster and they hire more skilled talent.

So what I think I can bring is a lifelong commitment to enabling and fostering partnerships. [This goes back to] 1990 and 1991 when I took on the first national mapping project of the Geological Survey of Canada, bringing together 50 different researchers from across Canada and industry working in mining communities in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. This fostering [of] cross-sectoral partnership has been really at the heart of my career. [It’s] that spirit of bringing people together to solve challenges – the biggest of which I was involved in during the pandemic designing and rolling out a vaccination campaign that helped save lives for Canadians, tens of thousands of lives. That same spirit and drive are what I’m bringing to Mitacs. Those partnerships are at the core of what we do and where we have impact, and where I think it’s so fundamentally important for the economy of our country and the health of our country going forward, given the significant economic context that we find ourselves in, not just with the United States but with our lagging productivity and competitiveness.

So playing directly in that space with the core driven by collaboration and partnership and talent is where I can bring decades of experience in bringing people together and driving ahead, both in times of crisis and times of opportunity.

R$:  You were appointed as chief executive officer of Mitacs in October 2024. Are there any immediate goals for Mitacs that you have made a priority to start working toward since day one? 

SL:  I had the good fortune of joining Mitacs in its 25^th year. I think it’s really 25 years of success with that unique model with the magic ingredients of this extraordinary talent that we have in Canada and people attracted from around the world to Canada in terms of the students. My priority is ensuring we have 25 more strong years, looking ahead to the next 25 years. To achieve that and to achieve greater impact in the decades ahead, I believe Mitacs needs to do a better job of creating awareness of what we do and the partnerships that we support, the impacts we have, to extend our reach.

Since 2018, we’ve supported over 12,000 businesses. But I think we have many, many more large and small businesses across the country we can support. Of that 12,000, about three-quarters were small and medium-sized enterprises. But I think there’s significant opportunity to expand our reach. I think there’s also significant opportunity to extend awareness of the critical importance of investing in talent and transferring research through this model, as one of a number of measures that the country needs to look at in terms of how to strengthen our economy to enable growth and our continued standard of living by improving productivity.

Secondly, we need to ensure we can be as efficient and lean an organization as possible. It’s an expectation of our funders but also the partners we work with. To that end, we are putting in place an integrated digital platform and transforming our processes to be user-centered in terms of responding to the needs of businesses and their partners, as opposed to [being] program-centered, which we currently are.

Thirdly, we are developing a new strategy looking ahead to the next five to 10 years and beyond to be the leading organization in Canada to support innovation partnerships and contribute to economic growth and improved productivity. And looking at critical dimensions of where we’re having impact in terms of sectors, our work in both large urban centres across the country but [also] in rural and remote communities with partners.

I think importantly [the aim is] understanding the needs of businesses from both the side of access to and utilization of leading-edge technology and research, in which Canada excels, but as well in achieving business success from that by bringing it to commercial success, penetrating and opening up new markets, building those strategic value chains or supply-chain partnerships. As well as the needs of businesses to adopt technology. We lag in digital technology adoption significantly relative to the United States and other countries. But also and increasingly we lag in the utilization, to a positive business end, of artificial intelligence. The talent we’re working with can support that as well as the leading-edge research. I think both are critical to improving the performance of our economy, which as we know but it’s important to reiterate, is directly related to our standard of living in Canada which, because of the lagging productivity performance lags other countries including the United States.

R$: When is the work on the new integrated digital platform for Mitacs expected to be completed?

SL: We’ll be launching the platform this spring in terms of the first version to targeted partners we’re working with, and the intent is to have it public and broadly used in the course of the next year, and then fully transitioned to it within two years. That’s something we think is critical to our own productivity and more importantly to have that service focus on the needs of partners where we’re seeing very sophisticated partnerships that we’re able to come in and support in sectors like automation and robotics supporting advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And in some cases, working with a number of industry partners and academic partners in consortia that could involve up to hundreds of internships with graduate students over the course of a number of years.

So we are having impact both at larger scale through those more strategic partnerships in targeted sectors, from life sciences to advanced manufacturing to quantum computing, but as well in areas that are responding to critical sectors in our economy, such as looking at critical minerals and supporting their development and processing, agriculture and agri-food technology, and energy technology and production.

R$:  Given your past experience as deputy minister of Health Canada and your work in leading the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, what are your thoughts on the recommendations laid out in the Walport Report, and how might Mitacs help in implementing some of those recommendations? 

SL:  I was deputy minister of Health Canada during the pandemic, and along with partners responsible for the Public Health Agency of Canada and other senior officials in government, we wanted to ensure that we learned lessons [and] documented what we did in the pandemic, and learned and applied the lessons in terms of going forward. We did an extensive review in that regard at Health Canada and through the Public Health Agency. For example, at Health Canada that resulted in some regulatory changes we made during the pandemic to support rapid review and approval of vaccines and therapies essential to our response. [These changes] were consulted on and transformed into the agile regulations [involving amendments to Canada’s food and drug regulations and medical device regulations] to bring those innovations to the regulatory system for health products such as vaccines, needed medicines and medical devices.

What we further looked at – and of course [was] supported by reviews that the Auditor General of Canada did and some other targeted work by the Public Health Agency – was identify a key area that I was involved in at the nexus of the public health response working with provinces and territories as the deputy minister of Health Canada and working with Canadian Institutes of Health Research researchers across the country. And that was understanding how we structure and advise government on and make public scientific advice to govern our pandemic response, and ensure that the research that was needed to inform the response, from understanding the virus and its mutation to how to respond to it through a variety of interventions and track progress of those interventions and the virus on an ongoing basis.

We developed and proposed, with the support of the minister of health, the report that Sir Mark Walport took on, given his extensive experience in the U.K. and [with] an esteemed panel of experts from across the country. I think they provided a very cogent [report] and actionable advice on a permanent science advice structure, not just for health emergencies but for emergencies, modelled on the U.K.’s Sage model. [This advice included] the need for an ongoing risk register and identifying groups of experts who could participate and advise in a time of emergency in terms of scientific response. But importantly [the advice included] as well as process for synthesizing and providing that science advice to government and putting it out publicly, which is something that didn’t happen on a systematic and timely basis across the country. It happened in part federally and in part in Ontario and some other provinces and not in others. [The Walport report also had] some very thoughtful recommendations on research coordination and, in a critical area of priority for me, on health data as critical to being able to see what’s happening in the system to allow people to have access to their own data and to ideally work toward a real-time response between critical data sets, such as clinical, vaccine, genomic data and other key things, including sociodemographic information that can help better identify how different populations are responding.

All of that said, I think at Mitacs we have an opportunity, and it will have to be borne by increased awareness and outreach, to see health system partners – hospitals, health authorities, health research institutes – participate at an increased level in considering the kind of research partnerships and utilization of graduate student and post-doctoral fellow interns supported by Mitacs to enable that kind of innovation [recommended in the Walport report], whether it’s on health data, putting in place some of the research infrastructure needed for future pandemic preparedness and response, [and] in working with organizations that have been set up provincially and federally, including the new Health Emergency Readiness Canada at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and other partners.

I think that’s where Mitacs can make its greatest contribution. We have a strong and growing presence. In fact, I think life sciences is probably our top sector overall in the country. But I think there are opportunities to further focus on innovation in the health sector itself, not only for pandemic preparedness and readiness, but more broadly on how to bring innovation into the health sector, which as we know suffers from significant challenges in terms of its own efficiency, timeliness of access, utilization of digital technology, and now the extraordinary opportunity that lies in artificial intelligence to better support health outcomes in Canada.

R$:  Is there anything that you felt was missing or went unaddressed in the Walport report but that is worth highlighting in preparing Canada for future health emergencies? 

SL:  No, I think it was a very solid piece. Governments will continue to reflect [on the COVID-19 pandemic], both looking back but also looking forward as new health threats present themselves, on how to respond effectively and ensure preparedness. And this report addressed an important dimension of that.

R$:  One of your earlier roles was as Senior Director of Science, Innovation, Regional and Aboriginal Affairs for Natural Resources Canada. What is Mitacs doing to support Indigenous innovation and training across Canada, and how will you support Mitacs’ continued involvement in this endeavor? 

SL:  Throughout my career I’ve had a strong commitment to both learning from and partnering with Indigenous Peoples, going back to my field research in Canada’s Arctic where, with the permission and support of local communities and Indigenous governments, we undertook that work and shared the results and learned from the people who’ve lived on the land and their traditional knowledge. I think the commitment to reconciliation runs through this and is something that Mitacs supports as an organization. I think there’s a recognition that there is an extraordinary opportunity with Indigenous Peoples and specifically business, as well as young people and students, that we can support [them] – both through our broad programming but importantly through some targeted efforts we’ve made.

The very successful program we have to support both Indigenous students and entrepreneurs is our Indigenous Pathways project, which has grown significantly over the course of recent years. We’re very proud to further support in the year ahead projects that involve Indigenous entrepreneurs but as well Indigenous students, who we can further support through our Indigenous researcher award, including for their travel to work opportunities in Canada. This is something that we think will be critically important in supporting the country’s economic strategy in working with an extraordinary talent pool and in supporting reconciliation.

R$: What are your thoughts on Canada’s current ability to retain highly qualified personnel and how do you plan to help Mitacs bolster that ability? 

SL:  Certainly in recent years if not decades, [there has been] the very clear recognition that a critical factor of success for businesses, for the public sector, for not-for-profit [organizations], is talent. We saw that in and coming out of the pandemic. I saw it acutely in the health sector, but more broadly that the need for highly educated people working in a broader social context of health and education supports is so critical for business success and our country. Having a competitive environment for that talent in terms of the ability to attract and retain it is key.

We play a role in Mitacs in that pipeline and we see great metrics. About 80 percent of our interns are hired within three years. A significant portion of international students who come to [be] Canada’s interns stay on, many of them in the region in which they’ve studied and worked, such as 60 percent in Alberta, for example. Somewhere between – depending on where you are in the country – 10 percent to as high as 20 percent of our interns go and found their own companies or co-found them. [Those are] extraordinary outcome measures.

I think in terms of retaining the talent, whether it’s at the point of graduation where they’re hopefully considering several job opportunities, or they stay on for post-doctorial studies in Canada versus going to the U.S. or abroad, I think having firms willing to invest in advanced skilled talent is a key factor. Having support for early-career researchers for those who choose to pursue research careers is key as well, and I know the [federal research] granting councils have that as an area of focus in terms of their adjudication of research grants and further work needs to be done on that. In targeted areas such as the work through CIFAR, for example, they have a key focus on early-career researchers from a global talent perspective, which is important. And I think the recent measures undertaken by the federal government in the 2024 budget to increase funding to support an increased level of graduate student and post-doctoral fellow stipends is important as well, as part of keeping people in those programs and ensuring that they could eat and be housed and then continue their work. I think in that kind of environment where we want to be positioned is not at the risk of brain drain, but brain gain as a country that attracts talent as we have.

About 40 percent of Mitacs’ interns come from abroad. We work with over 30 countries around the world to access their best and brightest to bring into Canada for these projects, and they stay on and contribute in our society and economy. That opportunity exists, but we have to be deliberate on it and I think this has to be a key part of economic strategy as governments, at the federal, provincial and territorial levels in Canada, consider the response on how to address challenges in the short term but as well address the long-term fundamentals of the economy, including productivity and competitiveness.

I think the opportunity for brain gain is real. We’ve seen that in the past at times where governments in other countries have policies that are not necessarily supporting the advancement of science or the attraction and retention of talent. Canada will continue to need to look at some of those key factors, such as some of the work done on the immigration visa side that allowed for rapid movement of talent as we saw support the startup community in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. And in addition to [offering] strong health benefits and a good education system, that salaries are competitive as well.

R$:  Mitacs’ mission is to foster innovation by connecting academia and industry through research and training programs. Where do you see the current gaps in this connection and in the collaboration between academia and industry, and how can Mitacs help to close these gaps/enhance this collaboration?

SL:  We’ve had phenomenal success, supporting over 12,000 businesses, 43,000 interns supported in those businesses, generating over $1.2 billion of research spending since 2018. But there’s a lot more of the economy out there in terms of businesses that we can reach. Some of gaps are very, very well known. The obvious one is on commercialization. There’s a lot of brilliant research ideas that get generated in Canada, and even if the initial intellectual property is in Canada startups going to scale often times, either in not accessing capital or other capability or wanting just to start in a big market, go to the U.S. or elsewhere.

The critical question is how can we not just keep doing the same thing and getting the same result, which is the definition of insanity, but try other approaches that can yield results. I would argue that Mitacs is one of those [approaches] where by having the talent as well as the investment and the research ideas all brought together, there’s greater likelihood [for success] than it just being pushed out of academia. The question is: Should there be further effort made downstream as companies try and secure their first customers? Can we enable more flow of skills into those firms, beyond some of the technical and STEM talents, that are critical to business and managerial success? I think the answer is “Yes.” That’s being supported by innovation incubators and hubs in the country, but as well by Mitacs through our Business Strategy Internship program that brings in students from business schools or social sciences and humanities to bring other skills and talents to bear.

I think another huge gap is on the uptake in Canadian businesses – and in particular in small and medium-sized businesses – of productivity-enhancing technology. The obvious example is digital technology where we lag significantly to the U.S. and other OECD comparators. We’re seeing that in utilization of artificial intelligence, automation and robotics as well. This is an area where we’re seeing increased interest in accessing the talent in Mitacs to help businesses work through those questions and think about how they can bring [such technology] onboard, whether it’s from coding and design or just working through the business strategy on what it means to them and how to onboard it into their operations.

I think the third [gap] that pertains to Mitacs is not necessarily a talent gap, but helping firms make getting highly skilled talent easy and hiring students. And by doing it through structured partnerships that can bring in researchers who help identify the students to address business needs, whether it’s part of someone’s graduate research or in a co-op or work-integrated learning program, including for colleges and polytechnics. It just enables that better fit. By doing multi-partner, multi-year structured larger partnerships as well, firms can look at longer-term investment. Indeed we have seen some large firms, both Canadian and global, locate or double-down on research centres in Canada because of that access to key talent, including through some of these longer-term structured partnerships, with Mitacs as the conduit to access that talent.

An important aspect of how we work – and something that I’m not sure is that well known but critically important – is that we do a research quality review. So every proposal that comes to us undergoes peer review. The scale of it depends on the scale of the proposal. But we have a database of researchers across Canada who participate and support it, a standing Mitacs Research and Innovation Council of leading experts across the country who support and help adjudicate on the peer review. It doesn’t necessarily support targeting in specific areas of need, but it ensures that everything achieves a level of excellence commensurate with this utilization of public funding and greater likelihood of success accruing from that partnership and the intern or interns involved.

An example is I worked on quantum as part of a broader strategy where there were very deliberate efforts of trying to help that nascent industry. It’s supporting infrastructure, including dedicated efforts in places like Calgary through Quantum City, or in Kitchener-Waterloo through the Quantum Institute. We will continue to look at those opportunities. We think that looking at some of these emerging sectors where integration of different technologies and end-uses, such as wearable health technology generating ongoing sensing and feedback to support both wellness and addressing illness, is an example where you need integration of different technologies to make it work. We see a critical role there, including supporting innovative companies in partnerships that can link them with other companies who may be customers or end users.

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