Graduate students across Ontario are receiving $16.89 million in new funding from the government of Ontario in an effort to place student interns into businesses province-wide.

The goal of the funding announced recently by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities is to move more students from the classroom into the workforce for hands-on experience. This initiative will enable businesses to benefit from new and innovative skill sets, and provide students with the opportunity to gain valuable experience in applying their research skills to real-life challenges, said Dr. Arvind Gupta, scientific director of MITACS, which will manage the internship program.

The program, called ACCELERATE Ontario - Ontario's Graduate Research Internship Program, was created by MITACS, a national research network that connects Canadian researchers with companies and other organizations to solve key business and social challenges. This funding will provide for 1,750 internships throughout Ontario across all university faculties, including engineering, urban planning, political science, geography, mathematics, business, environmental studies, architecture, veterinary studies, biology and computer science, over the next four years. Internships have already been confirmed with schools including University of Toronto, Ryerson University and York University. Local companies that have committed to host interns include, ENVIRON (EC) Canada Inc., Algorithmics Inc. and SpeechBobble Inc., with many more businesses to be secured over the coming months.

"Ontario is committed to helping every student reach their full potential," Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities John Milloy said in a release. "By funding these cutting-edge internship projects, we are helping students find new opportunities to grow and develop into the innovators we need to ensure Ontario succeeds in the future."

Under ACCELERATE Ontario, graduate student researchers spend a minimum of 50 per cent of their time over a four-month period at a company, undertaking research on a problem jointly identified by the intern, business, a supervising professor and MITACS. The balance of the students' time is spent at the university, developing tools, technologies or methods to address the company's challenge. The cost of an internship is $15,000, which is shared by the partner company and the ACCELERATE Program through the support of the Ontario government.

"ACCELERATE Ontario will show the province's graduate students that their research expertise is readily applicable to the challenges experienced by the province's businesses, from furthering the development of a new technology or product to improving daily operations," Gupta said in a release. "Ontario businesses stand to benefit significantly from the intellectual capital in the province's universities."

MITACS is a federally funded network of centres of excellence with offices at York University and Simon Fraser University. It brings together academia, industry and the public sector through research and training initiatives to develop cutting edge tools vital to the knowledge-based economy.