Technology and the Canadian Forest-Product Industries ... - ArtSites

Teach yourself. If you go outside we have to educate them in ourbusiness which is expensive.Results are specific to company.The common theme is that in-house R&D provides firm-specificbenefits that cannot be derived from association or governmentlaboratories or universities.Although the respondents acknowledged that sometimes forestproductfirms can be profitable without in-house R&D, they emphasizedits benefits. One R&D director, for example, noted that savingsdue to research on corrosion paid for the firm's in-house R&D manytimes over. Four firms claimed their R&D was on the leading edge inthe forest-products sector: one of these would not identify its area ofexpertise, but there is little duplication in terms of the strengthsclaimed by the other three. Thus one firm claimed expertise in paperfinishing, another in pulp bleaching (and forestry work), and a thirdpointed to work on reconstituted wood, thermomechanical pulping,packaging, and corrosion. A fifth firm claimed that although it was noton the leading edge it was doing important developmental researchwith respect to chemithermomechanical pulping and de-inkingprocesses. A sixth suggested that it had been on the leading edge andwould be again but was not now. A seventh firm noted that it was aworld leader in R&D on insulation but not on forest products.Although several firms had researched high-yield pulping processes,none saw duplication as a problem, in part because of the specificnature of each firm's needs and also because some competition inR&D is beneficial.Cooperative (Association) R&DAlthough few forest-product firms in Canada support in-house R&D,the three main cooperative R&D laboratories are large and growing.The Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada (Paprican), ForestEngineering Research Institute of Canada (Feric), and Forintek werepartly funded, in 1984, by 59, 45, and 142 corporate members respectively.The only other cooperative R&D laboratory, a small productdevelopment and plywood testing facility run by the Council ofForest Industries (COFI) in North Vancouver, has remained small andvulnerable to closure.Paprican is most like a conventional industry associationlaboratory because it is largely supported by annual fees from forestproductmanufacturing companies. The federal government was35