Maybe I'll lead off.
I'm not sure about that model in particular, but I will suggest, both from our experience at Mitacs and my personal experience in academia, that the demands on professors' time tend to preclude a lot of this sort of activity. My background is in biochemistry, and I know a lot of professors who would love to be starting up companies, and even have started companies, but they don't ever really get any traction because they just don't have the time to dedicate to it. Maybe the increased research and teaching requirements at universities have precluded that, I'm not sure. Maybe freeing them up three months a year would actually do something like that.
I think the desire is there.