Technology Transfer and Patents

Archived Topic Box from the 2004 Fourth Annual Benchmark Report

Public and private spending on research and development as a percent of GDP – an input measure – is used within our core benchmark framework as an indicator of British Columbia's overall innovation performance relative to other provinces. A good complement to this measure is BC's success at commercializing technology developed within university settings. As noted in the Progress Board's 2002 special report (Learning to Win), while universities are certainly not the only place where R&D is undertaken "it is clear that [they] have become a major driving force in producing and translating new scientific discoveries into fresh economic and social opportunities". Canadian universities perform a larger portion of national R&D than similar institutions in most other G-7 countries, and Canada's private sector is more dependent on universities as a source of innovation than other G-7 countries.

Results from the Association of University Technology Managers' most recent licensing survey shows that BC's largest universities are among the top 15 institutions in terms of sponsored research expenditure are among the most successful in Canada in two key measures of technology transfer. Simon Fraser University (SFU) ranked 2nd among the 15 universities for the ratio of US patents issued per million dollars of research and the University of British Columbia (UBC) was 3rd; Queen's University was first for fiscal year 2002. Simon Fraser University ranked 1st for the number of start-up companies formed per million dollars of research expenditure, while UBC ranked 8th.

Overall, the 33 Canadian institutions that responded to the survey, reported the formation of 49 start-up companies in fiscal year 2002, down from the 69 reported for fiscal year 2001. Thirty-one existing start-up companies ceased operation in 2002, leaving 493 in operation at the end of 2002.

The conclusion to the Canadian section of the survey report provides a summary of tech transfer at Canadian institutions relative to those in the US in 2002. The report notes that Canadian institutions exhibit greater intensiveness, selectivity and cost effectiveness on the patent side, as well as greater focus on the development of start-up companies and better overall success at getting products to market.

Source: Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), AUTM Licensing Survey: FY 2002.
Note: An interim report for 2003 is available but was not used for this analysis because of changes in the treatment of principal investigators' salaries and benefits; we expect the full report to deal with this change in more detail than the interim does.