A video report from David Phipps of day 3 of the Alliance for the Commercialization of Canadian Technology technology transfer conference in Victoria, B.C.
Posts Tagged ‘Conference
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Nov
09
Tech Transfer Growing Pains?
10
Nov
09
Way to Grow Tech Transfer
Our first ever video blog post from David Phipps of ResearchImpact on day 2 of the Alliance for the Commercialization of Canadian Technology technology transfer conference being held in Victoria, B.C.
I am posting from Victoria, BC (staying at the lovely, historic Empress Hotel) where I am attending Canada’s national technology transfer conference hosted by the Alliance for the Commercialization of Canadian Technology. I have a few days to reflect on Canada’s technology transfer (TT) industry where I began my story many years ago, my story which was recently told in “From Broker to Broker in 17 short years” posted on Peter Levesque’s blog at Knowledge Mobilization Works! Over the next few days I will join some of my former colleagues from my former lives as we consider the state of the TT nation. This is what I think going into the conference:
It’s time for TT to grow up.
TT has done some wonderful things for industry, academia and for society. Don’t just look at the money reported by StatsCan’s “Commercialization of Intellectual Property in the Higher Education Sector” which reported $52M in royalty revenue for Canadian universities in 2007 (Read the report here) but look also at the Better World Project that tells the stories of societal impact of TT. Nonetheless, The Council of Canadian Academies recently released its report “Innovation and Business Strategy: Why Canada Falls Short” (Read the report here). Canada continues to under perform on innovation metrics. This shouldn’t be news but academic TT needs to examine its role in this innovation system. Canadian institutions spent $41.8M to generate the $52M in royalty revenues (http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/scte04-eng.htm) not to mention all the investments in managing research contracts, Material Transfer Agreements and Confidentiality Agreements and support for internal and external legal counsel. The system isn’t running on all cylinders, or, as Ron Freedman of The Impact Group says, we need a new paradigm for research and innovation (http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/686405).
It’s time for TT to grow up.
By this I mean it is time for TT to grow, expand and explore new value propositions. The unilateral push of patents into the hands of industry is only one space where the university and industry interact. It’s time the talented TT workforce applied its skills in brokering university-industry relationships to the many other spaces of university-industry engagement. Some universities already take a more holistic view of these spaces. The Co-operative Education & Career Services administers the co-operative education system for the University of Waterloo. Luc Lalande (@LucLalande) at Carleton University spends only about 5% of his time pushing patents out the door. The other 95% of his time he is supporting innovation and entrepreneurship of his faculty and graduate students. Penn State recognizes the broader roles of university-industry engagement in local innovation systems (http://oewd.psu.edu/tre/files/Proceedings-10-06-08.pdf) and the Rochester Institute of Technology has set up a centre to support student lead innovation (http://www.rit.edu/news/?v=47022). Look for York University to soon launch Innovation York that will learn from may of these experiences and develop a hybrid of technology transfer, industry liaison and knowledge mobilization.
As we described in Evidence & Policy, KM isn’t a discrete activity but a suite of services. Why do we continue to rely on TT as the principle means of mediating the university-industry relationship? Imagine the potential for impact if we further increase the flow of people, ideas, money and materials between universities and industries by allowing the substantial talents of the TT workforce to support a broader range of university-industry engagement. Imagine the increased quantity and quality of industry matching research grants from CIHR, NSERC, OCE and yes, even SSHRC whose business, management, finance, legal and design scholars are very much relevant to industry.
As I previously wrote (KM & TT: Chapter 3), TT has something to learn from KM and that is why I am here at ACCT. Over the next 2 days I’ll blog and I’ll tweet (@researchimpact) from the conference. In addition to re-connecting with old friends I’ll be looking for new ideas and new friends who I can grow up with. I’m ready to grow up.
Are you?
The KM Unit at York was present on Thursday, October 8 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre along with over 400 Ontario Public Servants to learn about the intersection of public policy and program delivery (hence the catchy title!). York’s KM Unit was present as both an exhibitor and as delegates. With 21% of our brokered opportunities being initiated by government, the opportunity to have such a captive audience was one we took full advantage of. The Policy Innovation and Leadership Roundtable within the Cabinet Office coordinated this event and we are pleased to continue to build our relationship with this important unit of the Ontario government. The theme of Polivery was Wicked Problems (such as climate change, poverty, addicitons, domestic violence…) which continue to challenge policy development and delivery.
As delegates, we had the chance to attend sessions on Web 2.0, Horizontality (another new term to add to the lexicon and impress friends at dinner parties) and Finding the Evidence. Horizontality highlighted the Toronto Waterfront development and focused on challenges, barriers and successes to work horizontally, often within an organization that has several departments/units. Finding the Evidence featured a presentation by the Climate Change Secretariat that illustrated the challenge of coordinating cross-Ministry responses to a wicked problem like climate change.
York was the only university present at this event. Early in the planning stages York’s KM Unit held a couple of conversations with Policy, Innovation and Leadership to help frame the conference and to introduce them to York’s Brenda Zimmerman who has written about wicked problems and spoke at the conference. We had a prime, strategic location for our booth (close to coffee!) and enjoyed numerous conversations with government staff from numerous ministries. We shared examples of how we have worked with OPS, how we can tailor our services to meet the research or knowledge needs of policy makers or government program officers, and demonstrating how we are leading a national network, which gives the province access to research experts from across the country. We spoke to about 100 people and many of those that we spoke with signed up for our monthly newsletter. While we are active knowledge brokers, we are also proud to support informed polivery here in Ontario and throughout Canada!
On August 28, I had the chance to present on behalf of ResearchImpact at the poster session of the 4th Living Knowledge Conference held at Queen’s University in Belfast. The conference brought together academics, funders, staff and students engaged in community based research, knowledge mobilization and Science Shops from 17 countries. Our poster addressed the one of the conference’s main themes of student engagement and looked at Graduate Student Engagement within ResearchImpact- Canada’s Knowledge Mobilization Network, including in the KM Summer Internship program at YorkU and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Courses held at UVic.
Krista Jensen, Knowledge Mobilization Officer, YorkU
It was great to meet with faculty, staff and students from across the world doing similar work and to hear about their successes and challenges. Highlights for me were learning about student engagement in the newly created Science Shop called WUZULU, Intuthuko at the University of Zululand in partnership with Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Challenges at UniZulu include large class sizes, were many classes commonly have 800 students in them, the fact that most students also work as well as go to school in order to pay for their education, and the devastating effect of HIV/AIDS on the community. Another interesting project was the climate change work going on at The Science Shop at the Technical University of Denmark, which recently worked on a project to address the CO2 impact of foods on the climate. In partnership with a local municipal government, this project resulted in a visual aid similar to the well know food pyramid to show municipal canteen staff which foods contribute to greater CO2 emissions in order to help them chose foods having a lower climate change impact.
Some of the overall themes that emerged for me over the 2 days were:
- Students play a vital role in knowledge mobilization and community based research and engaging students is key to the work we do
- All over the world communities outside of the university are supportive of and very interested in becoming actively engaged in KM and CBR initiatives
- And while some university researchers “get” KM and CBR and have integrated it into the work they do, until more universities have institutional capacity for KM through university wide KM Units (like ResearchImpact), Science Shops or CBR Offices which have dedicated staff and\or faculty who are using the broker model to facilitate university-community partnerships, we will continue to see the university lag behind the community in their uptake of KM
- Some Irish dancing is a great way to unwind after a full day of workshops, poster sessions and plenaries
