Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to speak.
My name is Karim Sallaudin and I'm the associate vice-president of commercialization and entrepreneurship at the University of Waterloo.
I'll point out that much of our work at Waterloo takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
The University of Waterloo started as an unconventional institution and this has led to a leadership position in intellectual property development and commercialization. The university has a creator-owned IP rights policy that grants full ownership to the inventor. This policy has given rise to a university culture that has become the engine for driving commercialization success of student-led and research-based innovation.
I'll draw your attention to two of our important commercialization initiatives currently.
Velocity, Canada's most productive incubator, has incubated 434 companies since 2008. These companies, in turn, have generated more than $35 billion in enterprise value and created more than 5,000 jobs. University industry collaborations have served over 1,100 companies in the Advanced Manufacturing Consortium, a partnership between the universities of McMaster, Western and Waterloo.
Debate on Canada's innovation and productivity gap often centres on research and development within existing private companies. However, the activities and role played by post-secondary institutions like Waterloo are filling the gap today that private enterprises cannot fill effectively. I'll mention three ways in which this is done.
Number one, universities like Waterloo train large volumes of highly entrepreneurial students who, through their experience with co-op education, are motivated to bring productivity innovations to market. Students can often achieve this faster than incumbent enterprises can as students are not constrained by any particular business model as are most SMEs. Given the necessary supports like the Velocity incubator, these students are very successful agents of change and have generated productivity-based start-up unicorns for Canada. Recent examples include ApplyBoard and Faire.
Number two, post-secondary institutions generate the majority of R and D-based deep-tech discoveries. Deep tech is disruptive. Think about what happened to Kodak with the advent of digital cameras and the Yellow Pages with the advent of online search. To commercialize deep tech, both capital and specialized technical labour is required, but most Canadian enterprises have neither the will nor perhaps the ability to commercialize deep tech. An alternate way to commercialize deep tech is through university start-ups. These start-ups involve the university inventor, especially since it is the inventors who have much of the tacit knowledge to commercialize. They also benefit from a supply of specialized trained graduate students who act as diffusers of this knowledge from academia to the start-up. These students often take up leadership positions within the start-up instead of heading south for more lucrative opportunities.
Number three, economic growth and social impact are often not well aligned. Challenges such as a net-zero economy, climate change, sustainable health care, inequality and food insecurity continue to exist despite decades of strong economic growth. Private enterprises do not take on these challenges because the financial returns are modest and the time to returns can be very long. However, sustainable social enterprises founded on university campuses like Waterloo can take on these societal challenges and they do. They attract qualified employees who are motivated by the social mission, and they find capital to grow from a new breed of social impact investors and governments who value social impact alongside financial returns.
I'll make three recommendations.
One, we recommend that the Government of Canada provide more focused investment into increasing university commercialization capacity. Research, innovation and commercialization are part of a continuum. If we constrain one part of the pipeline in favour of another, the whole ecosystem and Canadian society suffer.
Two, universities should be included in any new programming supplied by the CIC to ensure that no innovation opportunity is left on the sidelines. We need CIC and other programs for universities to advance the commercial readiness of new technologies for translation to start-ups or the private sector.
Three, the CIC should engage deeply with experts at universities and incubators who have proven track records of commercializing specialized technology. To close our research and development gap, Canada needs a much more coordinated approach than what is currently happening. If we continue to look at education, research and commercialization as mutually exclusive, the productivity gap will only continue to widen.
Thank you. I can take questions now.