FPInnovations, the Laurentian Forestry Centre (LFC) of Natural Resources Canada, Université Laval and its Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics announce the signature of collaboration agreements aimed at developing the full innovation potential of the wood and forest sectors. This new operational synergy is based, among other things, on the complementary efforts of research forces and the sharing of infrastructures and laboratories, in order to maximize the impacts of research investments to the benefit of the competitiveness of the forest sector.
This sector is therefore becoming one of the first ones to align its innovation efforts to meet the challenges it is facing.
The announcement was made this morning in the presence of Stéphane Renou, President and
Chief Execute Officer of FPInnovations; Sophie D'Amours, Rector of Université Laval; Denis
Lebel, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Conseil de l'industrie forestière du Québec; Line Drouin, Deputy Minister of the Quebec government's Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs; Beth MacNeil, Assistant Deputy Minister, Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Forest Service, Jacinthe Leclerc, General Director of the Laurentian Forestry Centre and numerous industrial partners. This announcement follows the relocation, last spring, of FPInnovations' activities and the pooling of targeted research efforts.
For the LFC, the new operational dynamic is mainly based on sharing expertise in forest genomics research—until now absent from FPInnovation's portfolio of expertise—and includes, among other things, the allocation of office and laboratory space. This co-location of research teams and infrastructure-sharing will make it possible to broaden FPInnovations' scope of expertise and maximize the impacts of research investments for the LFC.
As for FPInnovations and Université Laval, they will pool their expertise notably in the areas of building, wood processing, forestry operations, Indigenous forestry, smart manufacturing, and climate change. This collaboration is being achieved through a master agreement totalling $2.5 million over a 10-year period, in addition to optimizing equipment assets which, by pooling the assets of each partner, allows researchers to benefit from a state-of-the-art research environment.
FPInnovations is also taking the opportunity today to announce the creation of the
FPInnovations Training and Research Support Fund at Université Laval's Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics, worth half a million dollars. Annual instalments of $50,000 will be paid annually to this fund over a 10-year period. This amount will be used to financially support the Faculty's student projects and to encourage the development of innovative and promising research projects in the fields of wood and forest sciences or any other related field that can stimulate multidisciplinary projects.
