Canadian schools are having a rough time turning campus projects into billion-dollar businesses.
Driving the news: Despite more R&D spending last year, Canadian post-secondary schools and research institutions made even less money from their intellectual property and saw a 65% increase in the number of university-linked startups shutting down.
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New data from the Association of University Technology Managers found that these schools and research organizations brought in just ~$171,000 in income for every $10 million spent on research last year.
Catch-up: Despite more government support over the past decade — and $8.4 billion in research spending last year — the classroom-to-marketplace pipeline hasn’t really improved. Over the past five years, most of the key metrics for commercialization, like patents and licensing income, have seen little to no change.
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Most research universities in Canada make $10 million or less per year from licensing the inventions built on their campuses. In the U.S., schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford make anywhere between US$40 million and US$95 million a year.
Why it matters: The longstanding narrative has been that Canadian schools produce world-class talent and discoveries, but all of the big ideas are scooped up by the U.S. While that exodus of innovations is still a major problem, this data suggests that there’s a more fundamental issue within Canadian academia when it comes to bringing research to market.
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One expert told The Logic that a lack of licensing income suggests Canadian universities are simply producing fewer “commercially relevant outcomes” (i.e., stuff that people actually want to buy).
Bottom line: Not all university research is intended to make money (University of Toronto researchers made $1 from discovering insulin), but it appears that a disproportionate amount of Canadian universities’ work is mismatched from what the market is looking for.—LA
