Education City
Research Shops/Community Engagement

The idea of research shops emanated from universities in Europe seeking to bring university experience and experience into the public domain and at the same time provide students with practical skills in working with companies, public, no-for-profit, government and community organizations. Providing such skills enhances the employability credentials of students, can be linked carefully to experiential learning experiences as part of the credentials in academic programs and fosters a greater involvement of every branch of society in understanding what universities and colleges do and how they can support the tax payer, businesses and institutions in a collaborative way.

The concept has been very successful in a number of ways and the idea has spread to many institutions worldwide. A number of colleges and universities in Ontario use his concept as part of their academic programming and community-engagement strategies. The models that have been adopted among universities and colleges for operating these ‘research shops’ has varied and to date, there have been no college and university partnerships jointly working on the idea. Education City/La Cité des connaissances intends to be the first college-university partnership to open and operate research shops that will be part of the academic programming and community-engagement strategies for the four institutions.

Companies, public, no-for-profit, government and community organizations often have a need for a short-term study on a particular issue but may not have the expertise, time or the funds to be carry out the work. They may also have a particular challenge to solve a particular problem or create a new model of operating and the research shop concept can provide a series of options based on theoretical and practical considerations.

So how does a research shop function?

Fundamentally, the company or business brings the question or problem to the research shop and the administrative team identifies a faculty leader and a group of students to refine and understand the challenge, develop ideas, options or solutions that are provided to the organization through a succinctly written report and/or oral presentation within a defined amount of time. The students will receive partial academic credit for their work. The experience can be recorded on extracurricular transcripts, provides practical links to people and organizations and offers an entrée into potential future employment.

In some countries, this model has been extended to provide a storefront for applied research, sources of external funding for students and research projects, joint sharing of intellectual property that emerges from the research and commercialization of ideas that has benefitted not only the organization but also the academic institutions.

Our commitment

Education City/La Cité des connaissances is committed to harnessing the strengths of colleges and universities in applied and fundamental research to create opportunities for improving the employability skills of students and promoting community-engagement in the Ottawa Region. For this reason, Education City/La Cité des connaissances is collaborating with Invest Ottawa in finding space for the research shops, identifying potential organizations who can benefit from the research shops and working to integrate this into the academic programming.

However, the precise way that the research shops will be established, launched and maintained will be discussed and developed by the Education City/La Cité des connaissances partnership. The first research shop will open at Bayview Kanata in January 2019 and we are exploring other opportunities to open shops in different venues across the region.

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