Caplan - Canada at the Summit - (Page 13)

new KNOWLEDGE for a new economy CANADA AT THE SUM MIT CRUNCHING THE HEC Montréal’s first example of academic research spun off into a separate company involved pathbreaking research based on gencol -- from the French, “Génération de Colonnes” or “Column Generation” or a branch of mathematics that can reduce the total possible outcomes from trillions to a more manageable several thousand examples. Such an approach helped speed up the development of number-crunching, problem-solving algorithms that enable schedulers to optimize their activities. Jacques Desrosiers, an HEC professor and his research colleague, François Soumis at the École Polytechnique de Montréal focused their main research interests related to large-scale optimization into new tools for vehicle routing and crew scheduling in air, rail and urban transportation. Their research has become the backbone of modern software systems that can provide optimized scheduling of planes, pilots and passengers as well as public transit involving drivers and riders such as students and the disabled. HEC MONTREAL NUMBERS A spin-off company, Ad Opt Technologies Inc. helps airlines to schedule their planes and crews. According to Desrosiers, in the late 80s the firm agreed to licence the technology by paying HEC $35,000 a year for seven years after which the IP passed to the company. The fee amounted to a huge portion of the firm’s yearly revenues. Today, most of the world’s major airlines and cargo carriers now use the system. (In 2004, Ad Opt was acquired by Kronos Inc. for $68 million.) Both the federal and Quebec governments have supported research at Gerad -- an umbrella research group including the four major Montreal-area research universities -- to the tune of close to $25 million over the past 20 years. In return, Desrosiers estimates that both levels of government recouped their investments, especially in the last five years from income tax revenues from about 400 employees at Ad Opt and GIRO not to mention the business taxes from the two companies. Moreover, he also points out that the vast majority of the companies’ revenues comes from foreign buyers -- overseas airlines and major cities such as Tokyo, Stockholm etc. www.newknowledge.ca http://www.ledc.com/g20 http://www.newknowledge.ca

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Caplan - Canada at the Summit