After Failing to Commercialize, Universities Learn to Set Ideas Free | Centre for International Governance Innovation

"Key Points

• Canadian universities produce scientific research that is well respected; they hold significant patent portfolios and have been responsible for many groundbreaking inventions.
• Canadian universities fail to optimally leverage their research output to advance 'productization' of innovations.
• Canadian universities should be encouraged to explore alternative models that help Canadian companies to address their challenges (in particular, in the area of intellectual property) as they scale up and engage in business outside of Canada.

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The approaches described above may be worth exploring if, at a policy level, the goal is to maximize the impact that universities have on the growth of Canadian industry and on the innovation economy, as these approaches may enable the results of research and IP to be more easily leveraged by industry, and they offer a number of benefits. These approaches take the commercialization process out of the hands of ill-equipped universities and put it into the hands of more independent expert bodies, or they make the results of research and IP available for free to Canadian companies. Most importantly, these approaches take into account the real challenges experienced by industry as companies seek to grow and scale up internationally, and they explore ways in which university-generated IP can be leveraged to address the challenges experienced by Canadian companies as a result of their own weak IP portfolios and strategies. 

Given the value of IP in today’s innovation economy, federal and provincial policy makers should explore the various avenues that facilitate the use of university-generated IP by industry, including those described above, and encourage universities to embrace them."