A new national survey is challenging the perception that intellectual property developed at Canadian universities is routinely transferred to foreign companies.
Co-authored by Brett Sharp, Associate Director of Technology Transfer at Innovation UBC, the analysis found that Canadian companies receive the majority of exclusive commercialization rights to patented inventions managed by participating universities.
The survey was conducted by the AUTM Canadian Committee amid an ongoing policy debate about whether publicly funded research generates enough economic value within Canada.
Technology transfer agreements determine how companies can use university inventions and other research outputs. They can include assignments, which transfer ownership outright, as well as exclusive and non-exclusive licences.
Researchers examined 3,164 agreements entered into by 10 members of Canada’s U15 group of research-intensive universities over the five fiscal years from 2019 through 2023.
The agreements were separated according to whether they covered patented assets—technologies with an issued patent or patent application—or unpatented assets such as software, datasets, biological materials, clinical assessment tools, and other research outputs.
Among agreements granting exclusive commercialization rights to patented inventions, approximately 70% involved Canadian companies. Another 11% involved Canadian offices of multinational firms, while 19% were signed with international companies without a Canadian presence.
That distinction matters because exclusive licences and assignments are often used when a company plans to invest significant resources in developing an invention. Commercialization may require additional product development, regulatory approval, manufacturing infrastructure, financing, and market entry before university research becomes a product.
Exclusive licences are also commonly used to launch university spin-offs, although the survey did not identify how many recipients were newly formed ventures.
The findings provide a different perspective from a 2023 Centre for International Governance Innovation report, which found that 45% of industry-assigned patents associated with inventors from U15 universities had been assigned to foreign entities.
The AUTM analysis notes that assignments represent only one part of university technology transfer. Within the new dataset, assignments accounted for approximately 22% of agreements involving patented assets and less than 7% of all transactions.
By examining exclusive licences and non-exclusive licences alongside assignments, the survey captures a broader range of commercialization decisions made by university technology transfer offices.
The international picture changes considerably for unpatented research outputs.
Approximately 95% of agreements involving unpatented assets were non-exclusive, allowing universities to make software, data, research tools, and other materials available to multiple users. International partners accounted for about 78% of these agreements.
Rather than representing a loss of exclusive Canadian control, the report argues that this global distribution can expand the reach of Canadian research, support scientific collaboration, and allow more organizations to build upon university-developed tools.
The survey does have limits. It covers 10 of the U15 universities and focuses on intellectual property managed by their technology transfer offices. University policies vary, and inventions owned or commercialized independently by researchers may not appear in the data.
The findings therefore do not answer every question about where the long-term economic benefits of Canadian research ultimately accrue. They do, however, offer evidence that exclusive control of patented university inventions remains more domestically anchored than patent-assignment records alone may suggest.
Read the complete AUTM Canadian Public Policy Advisory Committee analysis, Where Do Canadian Research Innovations Go?, for the survey methodology, detailed results, and implications for Canadian innovation policy.
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