Thank you for the opportunity to provide input to the committee's study of intellectual property and technology transfer from post-secondary institutions to companies.
While I'm representing NSERC today, I have a strong personal interest in innovation policy developed through 13 years of working as a researcher at NRC, five years in a small high-tech company, and many years at NSERC.
NSERC is one of three funding agencies—my colleague Ted is from another, SSHRC—that support research activities at universities and colleges in Canada. NSERC funding enables researchers to explore ideas, develop promising discoveries, and attract businesses that can commercialize research results. This year we'll invest about $1.1 billion in grants, the vast majority of which support student participation in research. About one-third of the funding is for knowledge transfer partnerships, of which only 4% is focused on commercializing inventions.
A key part of NSERC's approach is to provide funding that enables researchers to work across the continuum between discovery and innovation—exploring ideas, working with companies to apply promising ideas—which in turn generates new ideas to explore, so it's a virtuous circle.
Some of the NSERC programs that enable universities and colleges to support business innovation and commercialization have already been mentioned in testimony to the committee so far. They include I2I or Idea to Innovation, Engage, and technology access centres or TACs. More than 3,600 companies access university and college expertise each year using our support. They can work with 30,000 students who we fund and about 10,000 faculty professors. This support for knowledge transfer attracts about $95 million in cash and $140 million in in-kind contributions. By working in collaborative projects with partners, students gain valuable work-integrated learning experience. One in three companies partnering with NSERC hires a student from the funded project.
I believe innovation is a contact sport, and NSERC's funding is focused on bringing university and college people in contact with company staff while conducting experiments, building prototypes, developing standards, and undertaking other activities that transfer knowledge. Companies report that they gain knowledge and grow their research capacity; advance the technology readiness of their products, processes, and services; and sometimes even attract investment.
A study NSERC conducted with Statistics Canada a few years ago indicated that companies that participate in our programs tend to have higher sales and employment after they start collaborating with university or college teams.
We also invest in helping university inventions attract business investment. Each year we support about 50 projects through our Idea to Innovation program, and in a context where one in 10 start-ups typically succeeds, we're pleased that about one in seven of the Idea to Innovation projects results in products or services sold by Canadian companies and, of course, the creation of jobs.
NSERC also supports centres focused on technology commercialization. These are the centres of excellence for commercialization and research. These centres often focus on commercializing the results of university research. One example is GreenCentre Canada, which applies academic inventions to develop green chemistry-based solutions to meet the needs of various industries. These centres are effective in commercializing technology and attracting funding from other governments and investors as well as generating income from successful market entry.
In 2004, NSERC began funding applied research at colleges. This funding leverages the advantages of Canadian colleges, polytechnics, and CEGEPs. They are a local presence; they have a client focus; and of course they have talented staff and students.
This year we'll provide more than 500 grants to more than 70 colleges and help about 1,000 companies advance their innovation projects. A key element of the support is a network of 30 technology access centres. Each centre supports the innovation needs of local companies in domains ranging from agriculture to advanced manufacturing. To increase the effectiveness of these centres, NSERC is supporting a networking organization that shares leads and best practices among the centres to improve their reach and reputation.
NSERC has supported research collaborations between business and university researchers for more than 30 years, and we continue to evolve to increase the impact of our support. This includes changes to NSERC's approach to intellectual property. For example, in 2009 we began permitting intellectual property to be assigned to the participating company. In 2015, NSERC implemented open access—which I believe Ted will talk more about as a general concept—which helps companies find researchers with relevant expertise.
Currently, we are working to reduce the time for funding to flow in our partnership grants, reducing the friction in our processes. We are also working to streamline the process of developing IP agreements between universities and companies.
As the committee has heard, while large companies can keep an eye out for promising ideas and researchers, small companies don't have that luxury. Recognizing these challenges, in 2009 NSERC launched a series of actions aimed at making it easier for companies to access university capabilities under the brand “Strategy for Partnerships and Innovation”.
The objective of this strategy is to double in five years the number of companies that partner with NSERC. As a result, we now fund mixer events that encourage researchers and companies to meet, support research visits to define projects, and support six-month Engage projects that do not require company cash but do assign foreground IP to the company. These changes provide a better runway for new partnerships to form, and the impact has exceeded our expectations. And, yes, we have more than doubled the number of partners participating.
Finally, the testimony and discussion at this committee have explored ways to increase the awareness of, linkage to, and use of the capabilities created by the government's investment in research at universities and colleges. The possibilities have included developing public repositories of information about research capacity, such as databases, and strengthening interpersonal connections through enhanced networks and/or concierge services. NSERC and, more particularly, its five regional offices continue to work with a wide variety of organizations on both these fronts to better mobilize the knowledge and talent at Canada's universities and colleges for the benefit of all Canadians.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.