The issue of startup funding falling short in Canada is talked about in startup circles just as much as the weather in this country. This topic is something I have shared my opinion on before but that post was aimed at early stage companies. I am not sure if there really is a problem with funding or just with the companies in Canada that are at that stage. A more serious worry about this conversation is the rational that academic research (ergo the institutions that conduct them) are less important than VC investment in economic development:
“We’ve bought into the idea that academic research is the engine of economic development and that’s a fallacy,” says Dr. Patricia Lorenz, chair of NAO.
Canada spends roughly $11.3 Billion on Higher Ed based research. The top school on research spending is the University of Toronto with $915 Million of that. The next highest school is at $575 Million (UBC) then at #6 it drops to $325 Million. This isn’t far off from US schools but there are a lot more schools with research spending over $100 Million. Alumni from ‘top schools’ in the US have received $12.5 Billion in funding across 559 deals since 2007. These are people that have been exposed directly or indirectly to the environment that is created around the research spending of those schools. We don’t have similar data in Canada (that I know of).
What were the Federal (government) research dollars spent at the “top schools” in the US?
- Stanford University ($840 million)
- Harvard University ($686 million)
- University of California, Berkeley ($694 million)
- New York University (I couldn’t find a number)
- University of Pennsylvania ($770 million)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($677 million)
If you assume NYU is a bit above the average of the above in spending, that amounts to an annual of roughly $4.5 Billion in research spending at just 6 schools. Schools develop the talent that builds the companies that require the funding. Those are big number unless you contrast that with Canadian company R&D spending which is pegged at $10.9 Billion last year (I don’t know what amount of that goes to sponsored research in universities). RIM and Bombardier, top of that list, account for $1.54 and $1.34 Billion each.
In total, three times the research spending of the University of Toronto is going to closed research to aide mobile devices, snowmobiles, planes, and trains. I am not saying that is a bad thing at all. What I wanted to point out is that, relatively speaking, Universities really don’t spend that much on research factoring in the diversity of the research and the number of people that benefit from it directly or indirectly.
The persistant question that people tend to oversimplify, how much of that research spent at Universities translates into economic development? The answer to that depends on your metrics. Typically I think people point towards the commercialization results of a university. That is a only a part of the picture. The numbers above from 6 schools in the US that spend $22.5 Billion over five years ($4.5/yr) turned out students that raised $12.5 Billion in financing. Are you going to question any of those top US schools commercialization or their role in being an “engine of economic development?”
btw, ATI was founded in a dorm room at UofT in 1984 and exited for how many billions after changing the world of computers? Ebay? WattPad? Do we need to list them all? We probably do.
