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.
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.
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.
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
