How university research can boost economic growth

University research in Canada has made a significant contribution to technological progress, and therefore to growth in our productivity and in our living standards, in a piece published by CD Howe.

In From Curiosity to Wealth Creation: How University Research Can Boost Economic Growth, author Peter Howitt (pictured), the Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Brown University and Fellow in Residence at CD Howe Institute, says there are several ways that contribution could be made even more significant.

This investigation has led me to the following six recommendations:

1.         Canadian businesses need to spend more on research and development expenditures, in order to play their role in the technology transfer process as effectively as do their counterparts in the US. Encouraging more Canadian business R&D will enhance the transfer of knowledge from universities to society as a whole, not just directly but also indirectly. University researchers should be freed to specialize in what they do best, which is research, rather than having also to undertake the kind of development activities that are best conducted in the business sector. Such reforms will generate a higher level and quality of knowledge to be transferred.

2. Federal granting agencies should reorient their system of allocating public funding of academic research to give more weight to overall academic excellence rather than immediate practical payoff. 

The universities and researchers that generate the greatest benefit to industry are those that are rated most highly on general academic grounds, and the best way the agencies can help attract top university scientists and engineers is to fashion a research environment that is focused on supporting the kind of research these academics like to engage in. 

3.         University Technology Transfer Offices play an important part in facilitating industry/academy interactions, bridging the gap between the cultures of commerce and open science. They could do a better job if they would focus more on fostering general interactions between business and faculty, and less on generating licensing revenue. As in many other industries, they would probably also do a better job if there were more of them offering competing services. The federal government has taken the lead in creating supra-university organizations that are empowered to offer their services to university researchers.

Provincial governments should consider taking more efforts to create such institutions, and universities could do a lot to make sure that the most efficient institutions end up doing the bulk of commercialization in each specialty and each region by allowing their faculty members to be free agents when looking to commercialize their research findings or to find business partners or sponsors, rather than forcing them to go through a TTO with monopoly rights.

4.         The recommendations of the Jenkins report to the effect that National Research Council Institutes should be converted from research organizations into agencies devoted to fostering university/industry interactions should be carried out, because the locus of scientific research in Canada should be in universities where the synergies between research and teaching can be most effectively exploited. An effort should be made to convert at least some of these institutes into the kind of supra-university technology transfer office envisioned in the previous recommendation.

5.         The NSERC and SSHRC should follow the lead of the CIHR by insisting that all journal articles resulting from research that they fund be made freely accessible to the public, and by creating an internet repository for all papers resulting from such research. This is one of the least costly, simplest, and most effective ways in which Canada could start to get more social benefit from university research, by making research findings available at very low cost to anyone, not just to those at universities and other institutions able to access the high-cost journals in which most scientific findings are now published.

6. The federal government should develop a set of standard protocols, based on the example of the “Lambert toolkit” in the UK,that universities could adopt to regularize the sharing of IP ownership and licensing revenue between university, researchers and business partners. This would help to make universities become more accessible and predictable resources for businesses that wish to partner with them and for those that seek their help in solving technological problems.