Transcript
Transcript: Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar Lecture: How Universities Are Driving Innovation
[00:00:00 Video opens with an aerial view of the Parliament Buildings.]
[Overlaid text on screen: We would like to begin by acknowledging that this event is filmed on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. We encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the traditional Indigenous territory you occupy.
[00:00:14 Exterior view of the Canada School of Public Service building. Text on screen: Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar Lecture: How Universities Are Driving Innovation.]
[00:00:30 A video of Shiri Breznitz seated in front of a row of all the Provincial flags. Overlaid text on screen: Visiting Scholar, Shiri Breznitz.]
[00:00:35 A video of Taki Sarantakis in conversation with his guest on stage.]
[Overlaid text on screen: Discussion with Taki Sarantakis.]
[00:00:42 Shiri Breznitz appears full screen seated in front of a row of all the Provincial flags. The camera shows various angles as she presents her lecture.]
[Overlaid text on screen: Shiri Breznitz, Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation, Munk School, University of Toronto.]
Shiri Breznitz: Hello, everyone, my name is Shiri Breznitz. I am the Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and the 2026 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service. Thank you for the opportunity to share my work with you today.
In the Prime Minister's mandate letter, 7 government priorities were identified. Today, I want to focus on several of them in particular: building the Canadian economy; protecting Canadian sovereignty; and attracting the best talent in the world to help grow our economy. The main argument is that these goals can be advanced through innovation policy, especially through the role of universities, technology commercialization, and student entrepreneurship.
So, why should policymakers care about higher education? The simple answer is that universities train our workforce. But the bigger reason is that the global economy is now driven by knowledge. It is no longer enough to rely only on natural resources or traditional advantages. Countries and regions are competing globally, and one of the most important assets they have is knowledge. To compete successfully, you need to make use of the knowledge base in your country or region. Universities are the main source of that knowledge. Universities contribute to the economy in both direct and indirect ways.
Directly, they create jobs, purchase goods and services, and invest in infrastructure and real estate. Indirectly, they contribute through the graduates they train and through the commercialization of research. Some of the world's most important technologies have roots in university research.
Artificial intelligence, for example, grew out of foundational work at the University of Toronto. Dr. Daniel Drucker, a clinician scientist at the University of Toronto and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, conducted research on the GLP-1 hormone that contributed to the development of Ozempic.
Dalhousie University, working with lithium battery pioneer, Jeff Dahn, helped advance lower-cost, long-lasting battery technologies. All of these examples reflect the importance of public research funding. Government policy helps create conditions in which this kind of knowledge can emerge.
A large body of literature also shows that university regional economic impact is shaped by intellectual property policy. In most advanced countries, inventions based on federally funded research are assigned to the university or the employer. The best-known example is the Bayh-Dole Act in the United States, which passed in 1980.
Since then, many countries have adopted some form of university or employer ownership model. Across Europe, many governments changed their legislations so that research funded by the state is owned by the employer, and in the case of faculty research, that usually means the university. There are two major exemptions: Sweden and Canada.
In Sweden, the inventor owns the intellectual property, and universities are generally not involved in commercialization. In Canada, there is no federal policy that determines ownership of inventions resulting from federally funded research. Instead, individual universities have developed their own IP policies, and in many cases, ownership rests with the inventor.
That has important consequences. Many inventions developed with public funding have ended up being individually owned. As a result, when these technologies are sold or commercialized, the returns often go to the individual inventor rather than back into the public system that helped fund the research in the first place. This has contributed to losses in knowledge retention, human capital, and product availability in Canada. In some cases, technologies developed in Canada have become available abroad before they became widely accessible here.
Other countries have addressed this issue more directly. Israel, for example, created a policy requiring inventors and firms to repay a multiple of the public development support if the invention is sold outside the country. Ontario also has taken steps in this area. In spring 2019, the Government of Ontario established the Expert Panel on Intellectual Property to review the province's approach to protecting the commercialization of ideas emerging from publicly funded research.
The panel was chaired by former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie, and included legal policy, and private sector experts. Its goal was to develop a framework that would help Ontario capture more of the economic value from its own research and development investment, rather than seeing promising inventions sold too early to foreign firms. The panel's conclusions were striking. It found a broad lack of IP literacy across the innovation system and noted that valuable knowledge often remained unused on what it called "academic shelves".
To address this, the panel recommended creating a centralized provincial resource: now it's called Intellectual Property Ontario, or IPON, to provide legal and strategic support. It also called for mandatory IP education for publicly funded researchers and entrepreneurs, as well as a more coherent governance framework for innovation support organizations. These were important recommendations. But, because most university research is funded federally, Canada still faces a larger issue: we don't yet have federal IP ownership policy.
Now, even when IP policy is in place, that alone is not enough. The Bayh-Dole Act in the United States was designed to encourage universities to play a more active role in commercialization and help move academic inventions into use. There is an ongoing debate about how successful Bayh-Dole has been, but one point is clear: IP policy on its own does not guarantee commercialization. The commercialization process itself matters greatly. This is where Technology Transfer Offices, or TTOs, become important.
TTOs help move research out of the university and into the economy. Their work usually includes evaluating inventions, managing the patenting process, licensing technologies to firms, and sometimes supporting the creation of spin-out companies. These functions are common across universities, but their effectiveness varies widely. A major reason for that variance is resources and expertise.
TTOs tend to perform better when they are staffed by people who understand both science and business. That combination matters because commercialization sits between the two very different worlds: academia and industry. Staff who can speak both languages are better able to evaluate opportunities, negotiate agreements, and build trust between researchers and firms.
The professionalism and credibility of TTO staff also influences faculty behaviour. Researchers are more likely to disclose inventions and pursue commercialization when they receive effective, personalized support.
We can see this clearly in a comparative example. Yale University's TTO has often been viewed as especially effective, in part because the university was able to offer competitive salaries and attract people with business experience to their TTO. By contrast, Cambridge Enterprise, the University of Cambridge's TTO, before becoming independent in 2006, faced more institutional constraints and was often criticized for lacking sufficient business expertise.
Business development capacity also matters. Strong marketing, negotiation, and technological assessment skills are crucial for successful commercialization. Clear administrative processes and strong due diligence are also important. Financial and legal capacity matters as well. Some studies suggest that universities that invest more in external legal expertise may conclude fewer deals, but more profitable ones, because staff can focus on finding the right partners rather than simply maximizing the number of agreements.
In Canada, this is a challenge. Only a small number of Technology Transfer Offices employ patent agents, and many universities operate with limited patent budgets. Employment conditions matters, too.
Universities that can offer competitive compensations are in better position to recruit and retain skilled professionals who might otherwise choose the private sector. Some institutions have addressed this by creating semi-autonomous or privately owned technology transfer organizations. Examples include Oxford's ISIS Innovation, and Yissum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Experience also builds capacity over time. Universities that have succeeded in commercialization often become better at it in the future because they developed expertise, resources, and internal commitment. Yale's experience with the HIV/AIDS drug, Zerit, is one example. The royalty from that patent strengthened the university's long-term support for technology transfer.
So, overall, the literature suggests that successful technology transfer depends not just on formal national IP rules, but on the institutional capacity of individual universities. In Canada, our research shows that institutional resources and IP ownership regimes are complementary. In other words, one does not replace the other. Universities with stronger internal resources, especially professional staff and patent management capacity, are more likely to benefit from their IP policies.
At the same time, several challenges remain. Few Canadian universities provide systematic IP education for faculty and students. Most operate with limited patent budgets. And many don't have the resources to keep patents alive for long periods when a license has not yet been found. Many institutions also lack clear commercialization strategy. In many cases, IP and royalty policies seem to have evolved reactively rather than as part of a broader institutional vision. Our findings also show that total research expenditures matter. Universities with more research funding tend to perform better in commercialization, especially when they use those resources efficiently.
So, funding matters, but so does strategy. This connects to a broader idea in the literature on the entrepreneurial university: universities contribute more effectively to regional prosperity when their mission, policies, and practices are aligned. For Canada, strengthening that alignment through targeted policy support, better resources, and clearer strategic direction is an important step towards capturing more of the public value created by university-based innovation.
Let me now turn to another important role universities play in the innovation ecosystem. Universities are central actors in regional innovation systems. They do not only generate new knowledge, patents, startups, and highly skilled graduates. They also support innovation and entrepreneurship more directly through incubators, accelerators, and related services.
Policy plays an important role here, as well. To better understand how universities contribute to regional innovation systems, we studied the Ontario Campus-Linked Accelerator program. In 2013, the Government of Ontario invested $20 million over 2 years to support Campus-Linked Accelerators, or CLAs, across the province's universities and colleges. The funding remained available until 2019.
Our analysis found that this support had a direct positive effect on firm growth, both in employment and product development. But at the same time, the CLA program did not impose a single model. It did not define one specific path for accelerators to follow or set a uniform set of expectations for participating firms. Instead, it broadly supported entrepreneurship and allowed individual accelerators to design their own programs.
As a result, we observed substantial variation across accelerators in both program design and management. We see this as a form of policy experimentation, but it also suggests something important for policymakers. When funding these kinds of organizations, clearer guidelines may help improve outcomes.
So, what makes an accelerator good? First, leadership matters. The way an accelerator or incubator is managed can have a real effect on firm performance. In particular, managers with entrepreneurial experience are often better at connecting startups to industry partners and opportunities. In our studies, firms that received services from or were hosted in accelerators led by habitual entrepreneurs, meaning directors that had founded multiple ventures, grew faster in both employment and product development.
Second, program design matters. More intensive programs appear to have stronger effects on product growth than on employment growth. One reason may be that building strong inter-firm networks takes time and regular communications. More intensive programs may help firms develop these relationships more effectively.
But the benefits go beyond networking. Firms in these programs also see the benefit from sustained guidance and hands-on support, especially when they stay involved for longer periods. Firms reported using a broad range of accelerator services and placed particular value on practical support, including staff guidance, help securing funding, business planning, product development, and access to workspace. In general, the services that seemed to matter most were the ones that helped firms make progress in concrete, operational ways. We also found that accelerators with a screening process, especially those requiring applicants to demonstrate proof of concept, tended to generate stronger firm performance.
Whether every university accelerator should adopt that standard is still an open question. It depends on the goals of the program. More broadly, there is still no clear consequence on how accelerators should be defined, especially in relation to incubators. Still, one lesson is clear: when governments design policies to support startups through accelerators, incubators, or other intermediaries, they should think carefully about how those organizations are structured, and how public funds are used.
Now let me turn to the third area: research collaborations. Research collaboration is another important way universities contribute to the economy, because collaborations help generate new knowledge. One of the major drivers of scientific collaboration is external intervention, especially government funding. The rationale is straightforward: knowledge creation produces spillovers and public benefits, so private actors often underinvest in it, especially when the risks are high. Government intervened to encourage collaboration and support innovation.
We studied this issue in the context of regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is an emerging field that brings together biologists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists, and others to develop ways of regenerating human cells, tissues, and organs. We examined how collaboration networks changed among researchers who participated in Medicine by Design, or MBD, a government-supported initiative at the University of Toronto.
This is an especially useful case because the program was explicitly designed to help build a new field through collaboration. Its mandate was to support the development of regenerative medicine research, and to strengthen the scientific network around it in Toronto. Funding was limited to researchers connected to the University of Toronto and its affiliate hospital network, the Toronto Academic Health Science Network.
Using MBD data, we built a panel dataset covering the years 2015 to 2022 for all 168 funded investigators. We then tracked changes in collaboration over time using annual co-authorship networks drawn from the Web of Science database. We matched these data to information on academic rank, hospital affiliation, work history, and other government research funding. This allowed us to examine how collaboration evolved, both in general, and specifically within the regenerative medicine field.
So, what did we find? We found that MBD-funded researchers significantly strengthened collaboration among regenerative medicine investigators and expanded their co-authorship network across academic, clinical, and international partners. We also found that individual characteristics, such as rank, gender, and prior experience, were associated with differences in the breadth of collaboration network, while organizational ties helped explain where those collaborations took place. Importantly, the program also appears to have strengthened researchers' ties to Canadian and non-US institutions, showing how targeted funding can help shape the geography of collaboration.
Before I close, let me emphasize one broader point. We increasingly expect universities to do much more than produce research. We also expect them to commercialize discoveries, support student entrepreneurship, and provide innovation services through Technology Transfer Offices, incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship education. But in Canada, most of these activities are funded internally by the universities themselves. Many institutions simply don't have the resources to support them at the level now being expected.
At the same time, when universities don't own the intellectual property generated through publicly funded research, they lose a potential source of capital that could help fund this work, so this is not just an IP issue. It is also a capacity issue. It affects universities' ability to build and sustain the broader innovation infrastructures that policymakers increasingly rely on.
Let me close by highlighting a few themes from today's presentation. First, universities are a vital part of the innovation ecosystem, especially at the regional level.
Second, innovation policy matters, but it works best when it is clear, specific, and aligned with defined goals.
Third, intellectual property policy is important, but it must go hand in hand with universities' ability to commercialize technology effectively.
Fourth, policy can play a major role in supporting entrepreneurship through incubators and accelerators.
And fifth, policy can also strengthen research collaboration, helping create new scientific fields and new forms of innovation. Thank you.
[00:24:17 A blurred video of Taki Sarantakis in conversation with Shiri Breznitz on stage.]
[Overlaid text on screen: Discussion.]
[00:24:25 Taki Sarantakis in conversation with Shiri Breznitz on stage. The camera shows various angles as the discussion progresses. Overlaid text on screen: Taki Sarantakis, President, Canada School of Public Service.]
Taki Sarantakis: Welcome back, Shiri. My name is Taki Sarantakis. I'm the President of the Canada School of Public Service. You have just heard the 2026 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar speech, and the speech is about something that is critically important to all Canadians, which is innovation.
And a lot of you might be going, "Meh, innovation. Who cares?" But innovation, innovation commercialization, technology transfer from the idea to a prototype to a commercial activity, is actually, believe it or not, one of the most important things that determine not only the quality of life that you have, but the quality of life that all Canadians have. So, Shiri, let's dive right in. What's innovation?
Shiri Breznitz: So, innovation, unlike invention, is when you take a new idea and you actually create a process or a service that you can use.
Taki Sarantakis: Okay. And so, you just told us innovation. So, what's an idea? What is invention?
Shiri Breznitz: Okay, so invention is discovering or developing a new way of doing things.
[00:25:54 Overlaid text on screen: Shiri Breznitz, Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation, Munk School, University of Toronto.]
Shiri Breznitz: So, if you think about the LLMs, the artificial intelligence, you are now plugging your information into a machine, and it does the work for you. It's a new process. The work is the same work, but the process of achieving the same product is different. Same thing with a new drug. When we discover a new technology, a new medicine, and after a long time that we try it out, we actually can use it. So, it can be as basic as doing things in a different way or creating something totally new.
Taki Sarantakis: Right. So, I think what I'm hearing you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is there's actually a big difference between coming up with the idea and taking that idea to market and making it a product and capturing some economic benefit from the idea. Is that right?
Shiri Breznitz: Definitely. There are a lot of ideas out there. Most of them don't get to be developed in any sort of way. Either because the market is not ready or because it's too expensive. But definitely, especially in universities, if you go to any university website and look for patents, you'll see a long-running list of patents that are available, but we are not able to do anything with them because we still haven't found the client.
Taki Sarantakis: That's interesting because I don't know about you, but I get a lot of ideas when I'm brushing my teeth. Like all the time, idea after idea after idea. And I want to say a secret. I actually had the idea for Uber long before Uber. One day I was like, "Oh, wouldn't it be great if I could track where the taxi was?" I never even thought about paying through the app. I was like, "But wouldn't it be great if I actually knew that the taxi was actually coming?" That was my great innovation, but I didn't do anything with it.
Shiri Breznitz: Exactly.
Taki Sarantakis: So, it wasn't actually an innovation. It was an idea, and it didn't commercialize. So, I think now in this ecosystem in Canada, we are generally thought of as being really good at idea generation. Is that true?
Shiri Breznitz: That's very true. Yes. We have developed some of the most interesting new technologies and inventions that are out there. So, probably outside Canada, most people don't know that the arm of the space station is a Canadian product.
Taki Sarantakis: The Canadarm. Yes.
Shiri Breznitz: Well, I'm sure they don't call it that outside Canada. But the other thing that, for example, people don't know is that a Canadian is the scientist behind Ozempic. So, Ozempic, started as a Diabetes medicine. And it's a research of Professor Drucker at U of T who found a compound for Diabetes from lizard skin.
Taki Sarantakis: Wow.
Shiri Breznitz: So, this is classical university basic research invention. It was very early stage. It was licensed out to a Danish company. I don't think it was called Novo Nordisk at the time. And they used it in clinical trials to create medicine for Diabetes. When they did the clinical trial, they found the weight loss differences, and then it led to their Wegovy and the other technology that came out.
Taki Sarantakis: And that's ironic because Canada also came up in the idea for insulin. The solution for insulin actually came from the University of Toronto, too – Banting and Best – something that every little kid in Canada, I was going to say learns in grade school but used to learn in grade school. I'm not sure now what they learn.
So, we have an idea and, as you mentioned, we're really, really good at generating ideas. We have a really amazing university sector. We spend a lot of money on research, and we spend a lot of money on something called, I think most people call it curiosity-driven research. Talk to us a little bit about what that is.
Shiri Breznitz: So, basic research is what most research councils, so the NRC, or if you look at the US: NIH, NIA, NSF –
Taki Sarantakis: I don't know the acronyms.
Shiri Breznitz: Oh, sorry. National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Department of Defense, all of this research, a lot of the research, is basic. So, you don't think about a solution, you solve problems.
Taki Sarantakis: So basic, not in the sense of being simple, but basic in the sense of?
Shiri Breznitz: It's not developed yet. So, when we, in academic language, we talk about basic research is you do it because you're curious, because there's some problem. In mathematics, they still try to solve math problems that are unsolvable. Most of us probably couldn't even look at those things.
Taki Sarantakis: Myself included.
Shiri Breznitz: Yes. But there are constant issues like that. So, the good thing about basic research is that it brought some of the world's most amazing technologies thanks to basic research. So, if you think about GPS. It didn't start as GPS. When we think about, as I said, Ozempic didn't start as a weight loss thing. It was started as another compound for Diabetes. So, basic research is you work in the lab, you're not trying to solve a commercial –
Taki Sarantakis: Right, a real world –
Shiri Breznitz: A real-world problem, something that you're going to sell. It might be a problem that there might be an interest for it, but you don't know.
Taki Sarantakis: So, why does light bend? Why does, if I have a glass of water and I pour this compound in it, why does it do that? But I pour 2 of the compounds in it, why does it do nothing? I'm curious about that.
Shiri Breznitz: The changes, for example, in the phones for different glass came from basic research on glass. I think it was chemistry. This is not something that we automatically think about a solution for, unlike, for example, pharmaceutical companies that are, "Oh, there's this disease and we are trying to find a specific solution for it."
Taki Sarantakis: Let me refine it a little more and again, correct me if I'm wrong. On one side of the equation, you're doing something with no practical application, and on the other side of the equation, you're saying, "Here's a real-world problem. I'm going to put money and research and resources behind trying to figure out how to help with pink eye; how to help with high blood pressure; how to help with all the things that pharmaceutical companies provide."
Shiri Breznitz: When Apple moves from Apple 16 to 17, that's a specific product that they're trying to change.
Taki Sarantakis: Right. So, in Canada, I think the statistics say we have the most educated workforce in the world. We have some of the best universities in the world relative to our populations. We even have the university that you teach at [that] is one of the world's top research universities, on par with the names that everybody talks about survey after survey after survey. The Harvards, the Yales, the Oxfords, U of T is in that ballpark.
At the same time, though, if you listen to our political discourse, if you look at our economic statistics, if you look at our productivity figures, if you look at our GDP figures, if you look at our per capita, and on and on and on, we have a problem. And so, how do we put those two things together? On the one hand, we do this amazing research, we generate all kinds of ideas and labs and things, and yet it doesn't seem to translate into economic benefits.
Shiri Breznitz: So, there's two different things here. One is the fact that our market is not that big, not because we don't have enough people to buy things, but when you sell a product, you're trying to sell it globally. The US is 300 million people. We are only 38.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, 41.
Shiri Breznitz: 41 now? Okay.
Taki Sarantakis: And for the first time ever, there's a minus side to our population growth. So, for the first time since Confederation, Canada got a little bit smaller.
Shiri Breznitz: So, it's not about that, but if we talked a little bit about basic versus developed research, if you look at our companies, they don't tend to do a lot of research, so our business R&D is very low, which means these companies are probably focusing on one or two products. They're not developing and continuing to grow, which is one of the biggest issues when you think about the economy and adopting technology.
Our financial industry, for example, when they use new technology, they like to use technology that has been tested somewhere else. Well, unfortunately, if you are a startup in the financial business, or in fintech, for example, there's nowhere to test it in Canada. In the US, if you are a US fintech company, there are what they call credit unions, smaller banks that can make decisions for themselves. So, they tend to test those.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes, savings and loans, more diffuse ownership.
Shiri Breznitz: Exactly.
Taki Sarantakis: We tend to kind of concentrate ownership in Canada.
Shiri Breznitz: So, when we've done a project with the financial industry, I would say almost 10 years now, they said, "Oh, we would love purchasing Canadian technology, but it has to be tested first." I said, "But you are the places where they need to be tested." So, our companies don't get a breakthrough in Canada. Most of the time it's easy for them – I won't say easy, actually, I should say easier – but the other countries will try their technology and then we are losing that.
Taki Sarantakis: We hear this a lot in the public policy space, which is at a certain point you've got the idea, you've got the pilots, you're starting to become a bigger company, you're starting to maybe get a revenue product, and all of a sudden it's like Canada doesn't work for this idea anymore to turn this idea into an innovation. I've either got to go to the United States, or I've got to get capital from Europe, or I've got to get...Is that...
Shiri Breznitz: Yes, so the capital is also – I wouldn't say it's such a big problem because in any country, the international venture capitalists don't invest unless there's a local company that invests with them. So, we have a little bit of a problem where we don't have enough local companies, but I haven't studied it enough to talk much about it. But the other side of the coin is the commercialization of the stuff that we are good at. Which is taking basic research and commercializing it.
Taki Sarantakis: So, let's talk for a moment about an example of what we've been talking about vis-à-vis the idea and the commercialization of the idea. And I think the classic one right now, that people hear about and talk about, is AI was invented in Canada, the godfathers of AI are Canadian, and yet we don't really have a lot of companies in Canada that are at the frontier of AI. We do have one. But also, a lot of the economic benefits that are being driven by AI are actually accruing outside of Canada.
So, I'll give the example as I understand it. So, Dr. Hinton came here from, I think, either the UK or from the United States. I forget. I think from the United States. He came to the University of Toronto, and he did curiosity-driven research on neural networks. And when he was doing that research, a lot of people were like, "Well, why are you doing that? Neural networks will never convert into anything." But he had a lot of curiosity, and he wanted to. And then he had a bit of a breakthrough, which is like, "Wow, actually, if you do it this, you can start weighting different words, and they will give you different outcomes, and it will start replicating the way that the brain works."
So, the research? Done. Fast forward to the "Now I've got something. Now I've got a product." What ended up happening? It got sold to Google, basically, who now is spending billions of dollars in AI. And we know who they are. They're the AWSs, they're the Microsofts, they're the Googles, none of which are Canadian. And all of the benefits of that invention that happened at your university are now accruing somewhere else. Is that typical? Not typical?
Shiri Breznitz: Well, because universities don't own technology that was funded by the federal government, it's owned by the inventors in most Canadian universities. At U of T, it's a joint ownership. But in this particular case, Professor Hinton established his company in the US and sold it in the US to Google. So, U of T was not involved in that process. But if we take other examples, you do have cases where we develop a technology. So, for example, in Dalhousie University, Professor Dahn had many, many years of research funded by the federal government that resulted in this unique technology for EV batteries. And Tesla came in a few years back and bought the rights for the research for $3 million, allowing them to continue doing the research, but they own the technology.
Taki Sarantakis: So, now Tesla owns the thing, the idea, the practical application.
Shiri Breznitz: Exactly. And they will implement it on their cars. But yes.
Taki Sarantakis: We had the same thing with Huawei a few years ago, where university professors were making discoveries and connections of circuit boards and optics and lasers and switches. And then different companies kind of came in and said, "Okay, I will give you $1 million to fund the next stage of your lab or $2 million, but I now own your idea."
Shiri Breznitz: Okay. So, when we commercialize technology, we want to sell it.
Taki Sarantakis: Right.
Shiri Breznitz: And we want to keep the research rights. The question is, when the university doesn't own it, the university cannot negotiate for you. If you have a professional Technology Transfer Office at the university, they would hopefully know better how much to charge or to consider how much money has been invested by Canadians in this invention to create some kind of balance.
Now, we have to remember that most inventions coming out from universities are very early stage. So, like in the case of Ozempic, nobody saw the future that it would bring something else. But that's the advantage when you have a professional Tech Transfer Office, whether it's a university or whether it's in the government.
Taki Sarantakis: Do other countries do it differently?
Shiri Breznitz: In the US, they passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, and there the regulation is that any research funded by the federal government is owned by the university because the idea is that the university will have –
Taki Sarantakis: The university, not the professor.
Shiri Breznitz: Exactly, and the university will have to push it out. There is a royalty share agreement usually in the US. It's usually in favour of the university: 30% to the department; 30% to the central administration; 30% to the inventor.
Taki Sarantakis: So, let me pause here for a second. So, the public money that went into the research, there's a mechanism to draw some of the benefits back, should that idea become something commercial.
Shiri Breznitz: Yes. And help commercialize this technology and other technologies because the money goes back. Many Tech Transfer Offices are independently owned in UA, if you'd like, and then the revenues go back to the university so they can hire people outside the regular.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you said 1980?
Shiri Breznitz: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: So, that's a 45-year window. Is it working well, not working? Have all the researchers left Harvard and Stanford?
Shiri Breznitz: No, they're all there. They're all working through this agreement. And not just that, most of Europe has gone through this. The best example is Cambridge University, which was one of the last ones to go through this change with a lot of resistance from faculty. And they're working with the university now with a highly trained Tech Transfer Office.
Taki Sarantakis: What do other countries do in this area?
Shiri Breznitz: So, most of them have a similar model. Israel, on top of The Tech Transfer Offices also has a rule that if you received funding to support your invention development or your firm, and you sold it to an international company –
Taki Sarantakis: So, it may not –
Shiri Breznitz: So, we're losing it. It's not going to be in Israel anymore.
Taki Sarantakis: So, we've created this cyber company based on the stakeholder.
Shiri Breznitz: Which is very much the Israeli model, understanding that there's no market in Israel. But there's two reasons for what they're doing. So, what they're asking is 6 times back the investment. And that's done for two reasons: One, to make sure that you don't sell too early. And then if you waited a little bit and your company is worth more, you will get more. But hopefully you will also stay and establish another company because now you have enough money to play with.
Taki Sarantakis: To seed your next thing. So, it sounds like Canada is a bit of an outlier, maybe in not a good way. We are an outlier in that we don't appear to care, and I don't mean that to sound negative, but we appear to be agnostic about what happens to the research after it's done.
Shiri Breznitz: Right. I don't think it's because of not caring. I think it's because it's very Canadian in the way it was developed, thinking what Banting and Best wanted to do with insulin, they wanted to benefit the world. The problem is that the world is not fair. The world doesn't play with this kind of mind. People own things. So, if you think about another Canadian company that for years didn't have patents, Shopify, our largest, most successful IT company. But for years they didn't have patents until they got sued on their own patents because a patent troll bought the patents and developed them and then they had to defend themselves.
Taki Sarantakis: So, wait a sec. Shopify, out of the goodness of its heart, said, "I'm not going to patent this, I'm not going to patent this, I'm not going to patent that."
Shiri Breznitz: I don't know if it was because the goodness of their heart, they didn't think it was important because it was software.
Taki Sarantakis: Right. So, let's put aside the motivation, but they didn't patent, and then somebody went in and bought those things and said, "These are now mine" and is now suing Shopify for the use of the things.
Shiri Breznitz: Sued Shopify. I think it's been cleared by now, but yes. Nobody cares about you until you make money.
Shiri Breznitz: Once you are successful –
Taki Sarantakis: Interesting.
Shiri Breznitz: And unfortunately there are these companies that they are called patent trolls and that's all they do, is they collect the information, they buy these small patents, they create these families of patents without going into all the –
Taki Sarantakis: They buy a basket of patents.
Shiri Breznitz: Yes, and then they can sue you and say, "I have all of this information."
Taki Sarantakis: Okay. Now if we are outliers and we aren't doing anything in this area, why haven't we been doing anything in this area? We've been talking about this stuff for longer [than] I've been in the Government of Canada, and I've been in the Government of Canada since the dinosaurs were roaming the earth. So, why haven't we done anything here?
Shiri Breznitz: So, the explanation I received is it's all about the collective agreements within universities, and that will prevent anything similar to Bayh-Dole to be established in Canada. As far as I understand, that's not correct.
Taki Sarantakis: Okay, so you're saying there is an economic interest here and the economic interest is, it's not in the professoriate ranks' interest to change the system?
Shiri Breznitz: Maybe, but the point is we need to find a way to both push the technology out but also protect it. Because the sad thing, and I personally care about it more than even the financial, is that we have technologies and drugs that we developed in Canada that are not available for Canadians these days. And that's the sad thing. And to look at our own faculty who developed some of these, and they are themselves shocked that we don't have access to certain MRIs or certain drugs because they are owned by different companies and we don't have them in Canada.
Taki Sarantakis: So, let me play devil's advocate here. Let's assume that somebody has waved a magic wand and I am now responsible for all research funding in Canada, whether it's from SSHRC or NSERC, or the other granting councils or specific programs done by different departments in the Government of Canada. I'll say the following to you. I'll say, "Why would we kill a system that's working? We generate a lot of ideas. You just mentioned them. Ozempic was born here. Insulin was born here. AI was born here. Why should we stop a system that clearly is generating a lot of good for Canadians and maybe for other people around the world too?"
Shiri Breznitz: Because we are the ones that invested in these technologies.
Taki Sarantakis: And what do you mean by "we"? Taxpayers?
Shiri Breznitz: Yes, taxpayers, definitely. This is our funding, and we need to find a way to make a return, if you'd like, to society. We need to make sure that, if we do this in a smart way, we can also leverage some of this funding back into the system. It will not cover research funding, just to be clear. MIT covers maybe 3% of their research expenditures through commercialization. So, the funding back will not fund research, but it will be a way to keep people accountable for what's invested and make sure that it comes back to the public and not to one or two people that were involved at the latest stage of the product.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. So, you've been in this area now for how long as an academic specialist? Because your academic specialty is Tech Transfer, basically.
Shiri Breznitz: Yes. So, I'm an economic geographer and I started working on regional economic development and realized the important roles universities play in regional economic development. One of the main ways is through commercialization.
Taki Sarantakis: And what have you learned that, as an academic specialist in the area, you want people like me, who are not academic specialists in this area, to really take away as we close this interview?
Shiri Breznitz: I want people to understand that universities are important. I think one of the things I've heard a lot since I came here is that universities [are] asking for money all the time. And we are asking universities for a lot. We are asking them do research, teach, provide service, commercialize the technology, carry all these costs internally. It's impossible. So, we either become Sweden, which is the other example of a country that has no rules about this, and say, "You are not responsible. You just do your teaching and research and you're good." Or, if we keep those high-level expectations of universities, then we need to help them commercialize the technology. The other part is, remember that universities are important part in our economic ecosystem. Like the government, like industry, they are an important part that provides all of our workers, the knowledge. And we are very good, as academics, in connecting the different players in an ecosystem.
Taki Sarantakis: Wonderful. Professor Briznitz, thank you so much for being the 2026 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar. And thank you so much for coming to demystify a little bit of a world that is full of acronyms, a world that is full of opinions, and a world that maybe doesn't have as many facts as it should have because there's a lot of, let's call them interests, that want us to think different things according to what their interests are.
Thank you so much.
Shiri Breznitz: Thank you for having me.
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