Turning Public Research into Public Value (TRN2-V09)

Transcript: Turning Public Research into Public Value

[00:00:01 Taki Sarantakis is shown standing at a podium.]

Taki Sarantakis (President, Canada School of Public Service): Hello. My name is Taki Sarantakis, I am the President of the Canada School of Public Service, and we have another treat for you here today. Today, we are with Dr. Shiri Breznitz from the University of Toronto.

[00:00:15 Dr. Shiri Breznitz is shown sitting next to Josianne Paul and Paul Pilieci.]

Taki Sarantakis: She is the smart Breznitz. You might know the other Breznitz but she's kind of the power behind the power couple. Her talk today will be based on her academic specialty which is knowledge transfer from universities, and we have some of the best universities in the world. We do some of the best research in the world. We punch way above our weight relative to our resources and relative to the money that we spend in the university sector, but we seem to have some challenges transferring that knowledge to other sectors. The way I like to explain this, and I don't remember who said this but I really should look it up because it's very profound, somebody said something to the effect of, science is really cute but if you want to change the world, you have to do engineering, which is to say the idea in and of itself, unless it becomes something, hasn't really done anything in the real world.

So, without any further ado, I will turn it over to Josianne and Paul who are going to gang up on Shiri, and we will talk about knowledge transfer, we will talk about knowledge, we will talk about commercialization, we will talk about innovation. So, over to you two.

Shiri Breznitz (Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation, University of Toronto): Thank you.

Josianne Paul (Acting Director, Policy and Strategic Relationships, Canada School of Public Service): Thank you.

(Applause)

Paul Pilieci (Director General, Policy, Priorities and Partnerships, Canada School of Public Service): So, we're here today, lucky enough to have Dr. Breznitz here with us to discuss a bunch of subjects related to entrepreneurship, innovation, and as Taki said, transfer from universities into the private sector. One small housekeeping item, so today, we're going to go through a bit of a fireside chat together, we'll start off by asking a few questions. As you can see, there are mics on each of your tables. So, at some point in the conversation, I'll ask you to come forward with your questions. If you have a question, just feel free to get my attention, I'll be looking around the room, and please do speak into the mic so we can all hear you.

So, I want to start our discussion here right off the bat with sort of a scene-setter. And so, the concept that I think is really important for folks in the room to understand to get us started is the concept of an innovative ecosystem. So, can you explain the concept for the folks in the room here, please?

Shiri Breznitz: Yeah. So, hi, everybody. It's nice to be here. I was telling earlier that the reason, I'm very honoured about the fellowship but the main reason behind me accepting is because I wanted to meet you all, and I feel like this is the last thing I'm doing and I'm meeting you all last minute. So, I'm looking forward to your questions.

So, to think about innovation ecosystems, you need to think back a little bit about other terms that we tend to use in Canada, so clusters, or as we all know them here, superclusters or industrial districts, right? These are different names, in a way, depending on your academic definition. But really, what we're trying to say is an area, and that could be on a national level, on a regional level, on a city level, or even a small neighbourhood, where you have different actors that are working together, collaborating, and helping promote innovation. The better these connections are, the more actors that you have, the stronger the innovation ecosystem is, right? And the different players, depending again on which academic's work you read, they can be universities and research, research institutions, of course government, the financial sector, and of course civic society. Now, you can break it down to more and more actors, but in a way, these are the basic actors that you need in a system.

Josianne Paul: So, if I hear you well, innovation is not happening in isolation. To bloom, it needs multiple actors. So, you mentioned universities, businesses, government, or even a financial system. They all play a role. How can you explain those roles in the ecosystem? How do they all interact? Why do they need to interact to make innovation happen?

Shiri Breznitz: Right. So, one of the last projects I've been working on is the regenerative medicine cluster in Toronto, right? And the organization that I was following is called Medicine by Design. It was funded by CFREF which is a collaboration of the Tri-Council agencies, but the interesting part of an area like regenerative medicine, which when it was funded was relatively new, now it's not so new, in order to create something new, you need new knowledge. Now, if we are in a closed system and we are talking constantly with the same people, right? We don't get new knowledge in. So, the importance of the different players is the kind of knowledge that they bring with them, right? So, one of the interesting things from this research is, for example, this collaboration encouraged people to collaborate, so they used to collaborate mostly within universities, now they collaborate more with hospitals which is important because now they talk to the clinicians, right? But also, we see them collaborating across Canada over older connections that they had in the U.S., right?

So, now, they are encouraging this knowledge to go through different areas, different provinces in Canada, different cities, and people who are doing different kinds of research, compared to, in the past, traditional places like Boston or San Francisco that are well-known when we talk about medical research, right? So, every time you have different players, and again, we can go and break it down more and talk about how central these players are, so in each system, you will have different players that are more important. In some of them, you'll have universities. In some of them, you'll have firms. So, if you think about the pharmaceutical industry in Indiana, it really revolves around Eli Lilly. It's a big company. It's less about the universities, right? When we think about Canada, thinks about oil and gas. Having oil and gas companies really leads the way to a certain direction because they are playing a strong role. So, each innovation system is different, the knowledge is different, the players are different, and depending on these connections with each other, you get different kinds of innovation systems.

Josianne Paul: Thank you.

Paul Pilieci: So, you mentioned, you talked a bit about the actors within an innovation ecosystem and you mentioned that different innovation ecosystems are different. There's no kind of magic recipe. Certain actors will play different roles in different ecosystems. Is there something that successful ecosystems share? Some things that tend to be common across ecosystems that are successful.

Shiri Breznitz: So, one of the most important things is the knowledge transfer, our ability to share information. And as somebody who studies IP, I can say we're not talking about proprietary information but ability to meet people. So, for example, I'm going back to the regenerative medicine, maybe because it's just the latest thing, but the universities and the hospitals always had this organization called TAHSN, which is supposed to help their collaboration, but they were really not talking to each other, right? And so, this is a loss if you think about the amount of knowledge on certain things related to medical research that they could have, over the years, collaborated on, right? So, knowledge in my view, if you look at openness, and again, openness meaning people willing to meet, so Boston, when they started developing the biotechnology industry, was known for Biotech Tuesday. It was an informal cocktail evening. Nobody was sponsoring it. It was unlike the U.S. traditionally. It was just organized by people working in the industry, meeting each other. So, one of the things we talk about with very traditional economics and economic geography theories is Marshall's theory about knowledge, about people being next to each other and sharing knowledge, and he described that there is something in the air, right? It's about people willing to talk to each other and understanding what they're working on. And in Boston, a lot of time, especially when the smaller companies started in the late nineties, they were talking about, "Our refrigeration system died and we just asked this firm to help us", right? So, it wasn't necessarily we're sharing secrets but actually helping each other with something, connecting people, "We are working with this VC, we can connect you". So, knowledge of research and development but also knowledge in the how to do things.

Paul Pilieci: Mind if I follow up?

Josianne Paul: Yeah.

Paul Pilieci: One of the concepts I think that maybe you and others have written about in the literature is the fact, I think, that regional ecosystems as a theory kind of sometimes is interpreted as like a recipe but that in and of itself, it's perhaps missing or hasn't yet fully figured out certain elements to make sure that folks can actually utilize it to its full potential. So, two of the concepts you had raised previously are sort of mobility and regional constraints with respect to those ecosystems. Can you elaborate a bit more on those, please?

Shiri Breznitz: Yeah. So, I'll just take us one step back to say that especially when we talk about universities and innovation people, at one point, we need to do the Stanford model, right? Only if we just copy the Stanford model, everything will be okay, right? But you can't.

Josianne Paul: Can I just ask you to explain what the Stanford model is?

Shiri Breznitz: Well, Stanford did so well in developing Silicon Valley, right? Silicon Valley is Stanford, if you look at the history. So, if we copy Silicon Valley, then whatever components they have, we will bring them and then we would be fine, but the culture in Silicon Valley was very different in Boston. This is one of the most traditional taught examples, case studies when we talk about innovation, is the comparison of Route 128 in Boston versus Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was developed because the founder of Silicon Valley, Terman, was in Boston. He was like, "We need to have this same kind of model. We need to make sure that companies are talking to each other." Well, companies in Boston were not talking with each other. They were big. I know nobody remembers but the computer industry actually did very well in Boston, and they were big companies that were doing everything, almost like Ford, everything internally, okay? But in Stanford, they started by helping small spinouts from the universities. They were all, not all of them like HP started in the garage but in the science park, and the university helped. But because they were small, they were also collaborating with each other. Boston lost the computer industry because they weren't talking to each other. So, it's a classical. So, your question about mobility and regional constraint, so the regional constraint is important because we need to understand what we are. So, if we want to develop innovation, we need to think about the region that we are focusing on. What are our strengths? Is there research? Are there universities? Maybe not. Maybe it's more, if we're talking about natural resources, there's an area of natural resources. So, we need to think about what we have. You can't change that, even though we think we can. Maybe there's certain things you can add and change and tweak but it will take you probably 30 years.

If you think about the Singapore model of innovation, they started from scratch building universities. So, you have that. You have to think that in mind. And I always say in Canada, everybody panics because we have the U.S. Well, yes, we have the U.S. It's a given. That's what we have. And so, our policy and how we treat innovation needs to consider the fact that we have the U.S. as a neighbour, and we can think about a lot of benefits that we can get from the U.S., not just the things that we lose by having the U.S. as a neighbour. Now, the second thing is mobility, and mobility, again, this is a good example, landing in the U.S. in the last minute. So, yes, we lose people to the U.S. but the people who go to the U.S. also learn by going to the U.S. because they have all these small and medium-sized companies that we don't have, and they learn how to be executives and they learn to do innovation in a different way and they learn collaboration in a different way, right? Sadly, we are one of them. Maybe you guys correct me but as far as I know, we are one of the only countries that doesn't have a return policy to encourage Canadians to come home. Why? They're literally there, right? They have immense knowledge. I think when we look at the case, we talked earlier about the case of Waterloo, right? A lot of the students from computer science in Waterloo, before they graduate, they already have a job waiting for them in the U.S. Great. That's not necessarily a bad thing because hopefully, they're Canadians and most of them want to come home and they will bring that knowledge with them, everything they've learned. So, again, it's all about perspective and how we use that knowledge. Can we find a smart way to utilize the knowledge that they're bringing with them?

Josianne Paul: Do you want to continue to expand on that?

Paul Pilieci: Keep going.

Josianne Paul: Because one thing that I hear a lot in what you just said, it's businesses, how they act. In the big scheme of things, universities also have a role to play. So, they don't simply generate knowledge. As you said, they line up jobs for people that can come back or they are interacting with the regional realities where they are implemented. So, how do you see them as a driver for economic development? What do you see as their role?

Shiri Breznitz: Universities?

Josianne Paul: Yeah, in the ecosystem.

Shiri Breznitz: So, I think the basic thing that we forget is that the two main roles of universities were always to do research and to teach. So, universities, I would say the main thing that we do in the majority of our time is to teach students, and we train the labour force. I'm going to assume that the majority of you have been to university because Canada has one of the most skilled labour in the developed world. That's one of the most important things. But when we look at universities, you can measure their contributions in two ways. You can measure it in the short term, which is how much money they bring into the region, right? So, think about just the government in Ottawa but the same thing with the university in a small town. How many people do we bring in? So, they rent houses, they buy houses, the university purchases things locally. So, these are things you can measure on a short term. But on the long term, we have the human capital, we have the research. Hopefully, from that, we also have businesses, and then you have the relationship with businesses which we tend not to talk about a lot, but the best example, I keep repeating myself, in the last, I would say, six months is about Ozempic, right? The relationship that U of T has with Novo Nordisk is amazing. I'm looking at your faces. It looks like most of you didn't know this, but that's basically a result of the first invention by Professor Drucker when he was an assistant professor and was licensed to Novo Nordisk.

It was what we call an example, pure example, of what you expect universities to commercialize. Nobody knew the value until they started to do clinical trials and they realized that there's a benefit for weight and appetite, but that brought Novo Nordisk back. So, you create this relationship with firms and hopefully that means that we have graduates that are going to work there. We're learning from them as well through this relationship. So, all of this is really important. So, when you think about universities, you have the teaching and research, you have service, and in service, we have the commercialization, we have the policy advice. I spoke myself with some of you in your roles but I know many of you approach university professors to understand current research. It's too bad we don't do more of that, like the U.S. does, on a regular basis. I know we don't like to talk about the U.S., now is a good example, but historically, they've been very good about learning the most recent research on any possible topic. Universities also contribute to basic real estate, right? So, if you think about downtown Toronto or Ottawa around University of Ottawa, without the university building their buildings, universities change entire areas and there are many studies that look at the differences between towns that have brought in universities versus towns that didn't and how it totally changed their crime rates, their economy, etc. So, there are many roles and many ways to contribute.

Paul Pilieci: I did a poor job as a moderator because I kind of want to pull you back to the previous subject a bit first. What I really want to ask about is the concept you talked about in terms of relocation of both towns and firms. So, you gave some really great examples about, we're located next to the U.S., talent can move one way or the other., but it is something, I think, regional ecosystems is, something we have to grapple with and I wanted to open up the opportunity for you to talk about the example of Israel and how they've effectively managed that tension.

Shiri Breznitz: Okay. So, the basic example of Israel knowing that most of these companies will not stay, they will not grow there, and multinationals will not come and build big facilities in Israel, it's not a safe place. So, one of the things of the chief scientist, later on became the innovation agency, the Israeli Innovation Agency, was to create a policy that says the following; if you received funding from the state to your firm, to develop your research or later stages of your product, and then you sold, bravo to you, you sold it, then you need to return six times what you got. Now, this is not because they're greedy, because they give very little amounts of money. This is not a big investment. There are two reasons for that. One is to make sure that the entrepreneurs don't sell too early, which is something that unfortunately, we do have a problem with that in Canada. So, this way, you are going to think, okay, I need to return six times what I got, so I'm going to wait a little bit, and the second reason is to have a little bit of return. Now, this is not going to fund the Israeli Innovation Agency but the funding at least will go back somewhat to the system, right? Here, one of my pet peeves is my issue with the fact that we don't have any rules regarding to IP in Canada. I don't care what but we should have some rules, one side or the other, but it means that we are losing a lot of inventions that were developed in Canada, funded by the Canadian government for many, many years with millions of dollars, and all of this, most of the time, goes to multinationals and we don't see the benefits, not even in research.

Josianne Paul: And to tie back the two topics, so you're talking about entrepreneurship in Israel but if we tie it back to universities, we have seen from your previous articles that there might be or might not be a link between the different educational path taught in universities. So, when universities decide to teach a specific topic in a region, have you seen any casualty link between what they teach, for example, esteem path and a higher entrepreneurial… and sorry, here, it's my French making this word difficult for me, entrepreneurial outcome? And if there was not, why and what type of activity can encourage entrepreneurial activities instead?

Shiri Breznitz: Yeah. So, if you look, in the entire developed world, we are promoting STEM, right? STEM, we want STEM education. STEM is really important, and it is important. It's highly important for when we develop companies, you need people with knowledge in STEM, but STEM graduates, people who have both undergrad and graduate degrees in STEM, are usually not the people who become entrepreneurs. It's very simple. They don't need that headache. They can graduate and get a good-paying job without building a company. That's really difficult, to be an entrepreneur. What we find in not just our research, we've done this based on the University of Toronto alumni survey that we've done but also other studies show you that people who become entrepreneurs are usually people that have diverse knowledge. It goes back if you think, very similar to when we talk about innovation ecosystems, right? So, the people that have both STEM and non-STEM degrees are more likely to become entrepreneurs, it's not like it's an absolute, but if you look at the University of Toronto graduates, we have that information and you can see that if they have that combination, and especially if they have an undergraduate in STEM and a graduate degree in a non-STEM topic, then they are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

Paul Pilieci: So, I'm going to start looking around the room for questions. If you've got questions, please get my attention. I'll do my best to bring you into the discussion. I believe we have one question from our President, Taki Sarantakis.

Taki Sarantakis: People always are shy at the beginning so I'll jump in, and I'll jump in again if there's another lag, but only if there's another lag. Shiri, I have a big question and a little question. Do you want the big question or the little question?

Shiri Breznitz: You're the President.

Taki Sarantakis: (laughs) For 10 more minutes. So, as you kind of said, it's a three-legged stool. So, we have the education system, mostly universities, although colleges are trying to play or are playing an increasing role in the space, so universities, government, and business. Tell us, in your opinion, a little bit what you think each of those is doing more right than wrong, and on the flip side, a little bit what you think each of those is doing that they could be doing better at.

Shiri Breznitz: Here?

Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, in Canada. Sorry.

Shiri Breznitz: So, first, you are correct about the colleges. And for me, it's higher education, so I just say universities, because where I grew up, we don't have a differentiation between the two. I would say, especially in Canada, there's a huge dichotomy between business and higher education, less in the colleges, for a good reason, but we don't tap into that well enough. So, as an example, the Government of Ontario built all these labs in most of the colleges that businesses are using regularly, they come in to use the facilities, but we don't do enough to follow up or use that opportunity to provide them with information on intellectual property, on marketing, on other things that could help them. You just come in, they get their service, and they leave, okay? The universities in general have still, and we are in 2026, a view in many of them that business is bad, if I as an academic work with businesses, it's a bad thing, and I don't think we are doing enough. When it comes to teaching entrepreneurship, if you go to most, just do an exercise for yourself later today in Google, even at U of T, entrepreneurship courses, you will find that there's probably around 300 in each one. Most of them teach about entrepreneurship. We don't teach entrepreneurship as an academic course, and we have a problem as an academic institution because we don't have the funding to create these courses to teach people how to become entrepreneurs, and this is a skill. You can learn how to become an entrepreneur. Intermediaries in general do it better but from the studies we have done, even getting a course at the university on how to become an entrepreneur is better than no courses at all. The businesses, I think, in Canada, I don't need to tell anybody, businesses in Canada don't do research. The business R&D in Canada is one of the lowest in the developed world and it's just been going down, and you, I can say that, you in this room, are not encouraging them to do research. They will not do it on their own, period. I think Shopify, which is our biggest successful startup, not startup anymore, is a good example of a company that does, I think they spend about 24% of their revenues on research and development, which is an outlier in Canada which probably explains also why they still are doing so well, okay? So, I think I touched all three. And then, the second question? You had a smaller question?

Taki Sarantakis: Should I give you the smaller question? Is that okay, Paul?

Paul Pilieci: Of course.

Taki Sarantakis: So, the smaller question, if you look at some of the universities historically around the world that have done this well, Stanford, MIT, Kitchener-Waterloo, the University of Waterloo, they're a little bit specialized. They made big bets, whether it's in computer science or in mathematics or in something. Do we need more specialized post-secondary institutions in Canada?

Shiri Breznitz: So, I'll ask you a question first. When you say they did well, did well in what?

Taki Sarantakis: Did well in helping to create or centre an ecosystem.

Shiri Breznitz: But you're assuming that it's coming from the university in Waterloo and I won't agree with you on that one.

Taki Sarantakis: Right, not that it's coming exclusively from Waterloo but that Waterloo, the University of Waterloo, has played an important role in the Kitchener-Waterloo innovation ecosystem.

Shiri Breznitz: Yes. So, I would say you're looking at certain technologies, because if you look at biomedical, none of these universities would be centre stage, right? So, if we look at biomedical, there's other regions that have done much, much better, universities that have done better than them. So, I don't think it's about being specialized. I think it's about the ability to transfer the technology, make those connections with industry. So, for example, Georgia Tech has done it well because they have sort of like a Fraunhofer within their institutions. They have a contract research institute within the university where they employ research scientists to just do research for companies, right? So, again, it goes back to these channels that we have. So, I would say Stanford, because of Terman and what he saw from the beginning, he created this system where it's just easy. And even in MIT today, if you look at the tech transfer office, one of the things they'll tell you is they don't do much because they don't need to, because they are in Boston and people come to them. So, if you are a company in Boston, you don't need to work as much to find face time with the VC, right? It's there. It's in the system.

Paul Pilieci: We've got another question from the audience. Before I go there, I want to probe a bit on the concepts Taki raised in terms of the three pillars, and I thought you co-authored a really wonderful article that talked about the role of intermediaries and whether more support is necessarily more beneficial for firms. So, could you please explain maybe first the concept of intermediaries and then get into what the article kind of discusses?

Shiri Breznitz: Yeah. So, intermediaries are organizations that are not government, not higher education, not business that are helping to make these connections, right? Sometimes they are touching one of these or several of these. So, if we think about Canada, we have several good intermediaries, Communitech. We have even MaRS. If I may be allowed to say that now, I would say they're probably a good space as an intermediary, and it's about making those connections. A lot of these that we have studied are accelerators, right? And some of them are run by universities, some of them are not for profit, run by the region or a chamber of commerce, different ones. Their ability to bring actors together, again, is a benefit for the region but specifically the different players that they bring together, and it also depends on what they actually are choosing to do. So, not all of them are equally successful at what they're planning to do and not all of them will see the results that we hope to see with innovation, right? So, if you look at accelerators, we've done this study looking at U of T, now they have 13 accelerators. They used to have 11 when I started.

And I came from a small university in the U.S. and I was like, "Why do they have 11? That's really too much." But U of T is a huge university, and a lot of these accelerators specialize in different things. But when you look at them, one next to the other, you see that they are very different in their ability to service the firms that go through them. So, we looked at how companies, following a period in the accelerator, were they able to grow by number of employees and by number of products that they have? Which hopefully shows that they are successful, and we found out that you need to have highly specialized directors, hopefully who are serial entrepreneurs. You want to have a program, so you want these companies to go through certain milestones. And last, I know we're not supposed to say that in Canada, but you're supposed to have a selection process, not accept everybody. And yes, you are choosing winners when it comes to businesses and that's okay. And hopefully, if you have the right people as directors and on your board, then you can actually identify companies that have the potential to succeed.

Paul Pilieci: So, if I'm hearing you correctly, is part of what you're saying that we need to also allow the market to do a bit of the weeding out for us, that we play maybe too much of an active role in Canada in terms of determining who gets that support and who doesn't.

Shiri Breznitz: Yeah. So, a few years back, I think Taki brought me online to a course and I gave a presentation on technology commercialization from universities and funding. And then, I had a question from one of your fellows who asked me, "But my husband has a startup, and if he doesn't get money from the government, who will fund them?" And my answer was, "If they cannot get funding, then they probably should not exist. That company should not exist." Because not all inventions become innovation and not all ideas develop to a product. You need a market. You need somebody to buy in. And depending on how, not specialized but how knowledgeable we are in supporting these companies and providing them what kind of service they need, we can help guide them but we cannot create something that they are not. So, I think I answered your question, going back (laughs).

Paul Pilieci: We're going to take a question from the audience. We have Nick (inaudible).

Question: Hi there, Dr. Breznitz. It's Nick. It's actually exactly tied to where you just ended and that is, to what degree does the source of funding matter and where it comes from? So, I think of recent efforts now, the governments were very interested in attracting investment, hosting a summit in September, trying to launch a defence bank. So, in this respect, what are the potential risks and benefits of having large amounts of money come into this space and how does it impact the ecosystem?

Shiri Breznitz: Coming to the space from the government, you mean?

Question: From a variety of sources, I think of outside of Canada, pension funds, so internal and external sources, because I imagine external sources will come with different strings attached than internal sources.

Shiri Breznitz: Yeah. So, good question. I'm not an expert on the VC industry, so bear with me. But from studies that we know, most international VC companies do not invest locally without a local VC company to invest in them, or at least somebody from the local country, region to co-invest with them. The fact that our pension funds don't invest in our startups is a problem because they don't have a leg up, right? Years ago, David Wolfe and Dan Breznitz and I have done this research with the financial industry in Toronto, well, in Canada actually, and we specifically were looking at the fintech companies, okay? So, I don't know much about defence. One of the issues there was that none the banks would take software from a Canadian company, and we did all these interviews with the big five and we're trying to send, and they said, "Well, we have all these American fintech companies. They've already tried their products on the small banks in the U.S., the credit unions that we don't have here." So, it's easier to take a company that already tested something, right? And I remember it was maybe the first few years of me moving to Canada, and I said, "But you're a Canadian bank, right?" So, still, there is a role for both government funding and dedicated funding to invest in local firms, again, with creating some restriction or what does it mean after we invested in you, right?

So, in Connecticut, they created a small fund, nothing like this, and they said, "Okay, if we invest in you and you need to stay in the region for X amount of years, and if you leave, you need to make a return back." So, it doesn't mean that there's a problem with that, and especially if you create, you bring specialists to run these funds and specialists to decide who gets funded. I know we have an issue of, can government pick winners? Well, it's not really the government. Well, nobody expects me or you to pick the winners. You take serial entrepreneurs, you take people with experience, and you have them make that decision, you take people from the VC industry, but it is important because the government role many times, when we think about innovation, is to reduce the risk, right? And if you want people to develop things, we learn that companies themselves will invest more in research if the government invests in the research. So, they sometimes would even double what they were planning to invest in if the government invested with them in their own company, which again, this is something that we rarely do in Canada. We don't invest directly in companies. So, this is good news.

Paul Pilieci: We've got another audience question. I want to follow up on that a little bit though, I'm sorry (laughs). One of the concepts I think you've raised in some of your writings have been, regional ecosystem players know their ecosystem best. And yet, us here as federal public servants trying to, as you said, inject funding, inject other resources into those systems, may not necessarily understand the nuances between those ecosystems. So, in your professional experience maybe, what does the federal government not understand or kind of get wrong when it's doing some of those types of initiatives?

Shiri Breznitz: So, when we talked about getting the Silicon Valley model, right? So, thinking that we can create the same treatment for all regions in Canada is wrong. They're different. They need different things. And so, we don't have regional agencies, as you know. Even the U.K. used to have them and then they cancelled them. If you don't have people on the ground, then you don't know what's happening in the region. You don't know who are the important players. You don't know where the knowledge runs from. You don't know who plays the central position that controls the knowledge or controls the network of people. And so, you are going to create the treatment for everybody. And again, the strongest regions with more resources will know how to benefit from that and others not, and I'll give you an example that I've learned that at Memorial in Newfoundland. The university was trying very hard to work with all parts of Newfoundland, which is very dispersed, and they thought, "We're going to create this program and everybody, all the small communities, they're all going to be in touch with us, right? Because we are creating this program. We want to give money." But they didn't have a buyout. And when they started to ask, they were like, people are busy, people are working. The community doesn't have a dedicated person to arrive even to the meetings, right?

I've been in a meeting in Italy a year and a half ago and there was a representative from the IMF, without naming names, and they talked about how they created this program that was supposed to reach community organizations and nobody applied. The community organization never heard about this program, right? It's too high-level for them to even know that it's there. I can tell you that as a researcher at the university, we get bombarded maybe twice a week with e-mails about, here is all the options of things you can collaborate with, you can apply for. Most of us, we delete, delete, delete. You will start asking questions when you need something, then you're going to start looking for it. So, you want government active. Especially when you think about innovation, you want it active both on the federal level but as much as you can in the local level, and the local, we're not talking provincial or even regional, right? Because if you think about Waterloo, it's not even a city, right? It's a region. Silicon Valley is not a city. So, a lot of times, one of our issues is these areas are not defined. They are a few authorities together. They're not one municipality or one community that can apply for it. So, if you don't know what's happening in the region, you don't know how to support it.

Paul Pilieci: Audience question?

Josianne Paul: Yeah.

Paul Pilieci: Mr. Stewart.

Question: Hi Shiri.

Shiri Breznitz: Hi.

Question: This has been great. I'm learning a lot. And in a way, asking my question a bit later, some aspects of it you've already addressed, so I'll try and crystallize it if I can. You're here as kind of a cross-cultural exchange. You're here to better understand us, and in a way, we're trying to better understand your world and your expertise through you. So, you're an expert in research translation. In fact, you're a researcher in research translation. So, I was thinking if you talk a bit about being yourself in the business of being a researcher in a domain, what are some of the things that work against you translating your research? People think commercialization when they think of research translation, but in fact, commercialization is a subset of that topic, and you as a policy thinker, you do research and then you need to translate it into impact. So, from the perspective of being yourself and your lab and your students and so on, why don't you do more or what motivates you to do less and so on? Number one. So, that's a question about you in this exchange relationship. And then, about us, if you think about our programs, again, from the perspective of being you and being an expert and translating your work, what could we do better in our programs, in your world, in the world of policy research translation?

Shiri Breznitz: Thanks, Ian. Okay, so in my world, I think I'm on the extreme side. I've always wanted to share my information with not just policymakers but with the community. So, if I interviewed companies, I made sure that they received the results, not the paper because the paper takes two years but a summary of the results. It's really important. For me, this opportunity is amazing. It is what we all should be doing. We should have more of your time, and I know you are all busy but as much as we can, to tell you about work that's related to your field. And I have to say, the Innovation Policy Lab in general, I think, has been very active in working with policymakers. Both David Wolfe and Dan Breznitz have always done it in their career and all of us that are involved are constantly trying to do this. So, we get requests from policymakers or from companies but we also initiate. Our speaker series is open. We have a newsletter. Well, we had a newsletter until recently that went to everybody as much as possible to tell them about our work but also other people's work and to make sure that these channels are open. So, I think this is important. But going into your second question, this is a wonderful opportunity but it really is just for people who work on policy.

But if you can have that almost in all of the fields that you have in the Canadian government, the richness of knowledge that you can have is amazing, right? Because our jobs as academics, and depending on in which university you're in, there's a different definition, but let's say at the University of Toronto, and I believe it's mostly in Canada, we are supposed to do 40% of our time in teaching, 40% of our time in research, and 20% of our time in service, mostly service to run the university, right? But for us, it's also service for Canada, right? And if we could find channels where you have experts, and I'm not talking when you guys ask us to come to Parliament for the five minutes on the thing and say our thing because I don't think anybody learns anything from that. I've done it both here and in the U.S. These kinds of discussions are the opportunities where we can actually share knowledge that matters, right? And then, you can think, "I want to know more about this small area." But you have enough on your plate. None of you are going to read my papers, except Paul who's done an amazing job reading my papers, but getting more by having a discussion, finding ways to bring academics and practitioners together, that I think will be the best way to utilize that knowledge that we have.

Josianne Paul: So, we have talked about funding, about transfer of knowledge. But in my mind, when we talk about commercialization and we're talking about putting things in place, the question in the background is always IP. So, how do we do on that front in Canada and how do we compare with the world on that stage?

Shiri Breznitz: Okay, so the federal government doesn't have a policy in regards to federally-funded research, okay? We are one of two countries in the developed world that don't have a policy when it comes to federally-funded research. Most of the world followed the U.S., the Bayh-Dole Act of the 1980s that says, "Any federally-funded research that the government does not want is owned by universities or research institutes that receive the funding." Most of Europe followed over the years and theirs are employer-owned, so if you are employed by the university, the university owns it, but it doesn't matter. Whoever received the funding, the body that received the funding, is the owner of the technology, and the reason that it started is because the idea was that we need to try and move some of these inventions out of research and push them into the public domain as much as possible. Now, it's true, if you go to most universities and just go on the website and write "patents", you're going to get a long list. They have these running lists of patents that have not been licensed to anybody and they're just sitting there, and the universities are trying to license them out. So, we don't have anything like that, and Richard Gold followed on Nancy Gallini's work from UBC, so Richard Gold from McGill followed on Nancy Gallini's work from B.C, and he shows, and I think I showed it in one of your courses, where a majority of Canadian inventions have a foreign ownership, okay? Now, if you compare to the rest of the world, yes, we are not doing so well. But again, going back to my point before, we have the U.S. next to us, a huge market.

So, it makes sense. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is that we are ignoring it, that we are not thinking how we can utilize it or the fact that we have an invention that was sponsored by the Canadian government for years and now it's not available for Canadians, I find more problematic than the fact that it's owned by a foreign entity. I think in Canada in general, if you look from the history of insulin with Banting and Best, the idea is to share, right? We want to share it with the public. The problem is that the business world internationally doesn't work like that. Somebody will own it. The story of Shopify, many of you know, they started with no patents, zero patents until they became very successful and then they got sued by patent trolls. These are companies that all they do is they buy patents and then they find the opportunity to sue you once you are successful. And then, it took them another two years to fight the patent trolls to prove that their patents were actually their patents, and they lost a lot of time and they lost a lot of money. This is, in a way, a sad story of RIM as well, right? And when Nortel was dismantled, all the patents had been bought by foreign companies. Canada had done zero to protect these patents, and the problem, again, is not the fact that we sold them, the fact is that we have no freedom to operate and use that knowledge that we paid for to develop or even, in many cases, to continue in doing research on it, which is a big problem.

Josianne Paul: And if we look on the global stage, who's doing better than us and what we should learn from them?

Shiri Breznitz: Sadly, I think everybody is doing better than us on that particular point, on that particular point. Depending on different countries in Europe, so the Germans for example, they help pay for some of the patent costs. Now, I don't know how many of you know but a patent costs somewhere like $30,000, because it's not enough just to register. Most of the patent offices require you to submit market research and that costs a lot of money. So, if you do patents, what we call tri-patents which now is U.S., Europe, and China, you're getting to somewhere at $30,000, and one patent is not enough. You usually will need a family of patents to protect yourself, again, because there are patent trolls, right? So, I mean, there are better ways to do things. If you look at CIPO, which is the Canadian Patent Office, I hope there's nobody here from CIPO but we can have a discussion about that, so U of T used to have a course on intellectual property where they would send people to CIPO's website. Do you know what CIPO used as an example until I think it was like three or four years ago, what did they use as an example for an invention? A rotary phone. Probably our students would think it's an invention because they probably haven't seen something like that ever before, right? But we brought Nathalie Raffoul to help us with the course that we created at U of T on patents. She blew up. This is not an example that the Canadian Patent Office should be using, right? If you think about an example, you all know the Google landing page, right? And even before AI, now with AI, you probably are looking at something like 30,000 patents on one page.

But even before AI, you were looking at hundreds of patents on one page, because the search itself is a patent. The design is a patent. There's a trademark on Google. All of these things are IP. When I moved to Canada in 2013, for years we were telling, and this is all the intermediaries and I can say almost all the tech transfer offices in Canada, were telling computer science companies that they don't need patents, because you're just doing software, you don't need patents, right? So, it's also education. And I think since the ElevateIP and the different IP offices, I would say, on that one, I know we're in Ottawa so I can say that, Quebec has been doing this better, I would say, than the rest of the provinces in teaching on IP and thinking about how to protect IP and putting money behind an IP organization that has professional people that can help universities and businesses to think about IP, Ontario had one but now I'm not sure if it's alive or dead, but even the basic of understanding. You take any student in the U.S. and they will tell you what is IP, and not just patents. They know. And here, you had intermediary organizations, many of them paid by the Canadian government, who did not understand the importance of protecting basic invention, protecting the name. You have a name for your company, that's a trademark, okay? Not understanding those basics and giving advice to companies when you don't understand what IP is, is an issue. So, I think we are better with the education part of things. We're still not very good in protecting the IP itself. The process of registering the IP through the different systems, we are still not there.

Paul Pilieci: So, we're coming to the end of our time together. Before I pass it off to Taki to say thank you, I would love to ask your opinion in terms of what you'd like to leave this audience with as your sort of last remarks for today.

Shiri Breznitz: I think I would go back to Ian's question and I would encourage all of you to think in your area, if this was somewhat beneficial for you, then to think about, okay, who else, what kind of other topics do I want to hear about and who are the people in Canada that are working on it? And most academics are super happy to talk, as you can see (laughs), to talk about their area of expertise, and where can we create these collaborations and continue this discussion?

Paul Pilieci: Thank you. So, I'll pass it Taki to say thank you on behalf of the School.

Taki Sarantakis: So, in Canada, we have a lot of values. We value social programs. We value social cohesion. We value safe borders. We value hospitals. We value education. All of those things, all of those things are predicated on our capacity to pay for those things, and all of those things will degenerate and will even be gone if we don't have the capacity to generate wealth going forward. This is one of my last kind of public appearances as a deputy minister. I want to say this very clearly; we have been criminally bad in this area in the last 30 years, criminally bad, and the people that are going to pay for this will be our children, and as it continues to decline, it will also be us in our old age. I think if you take nothing away from this, and you should take a lot away from this, is that policy is a choice and policy leads to good outcomes over time or it leads to not-so-good outcomes over time, and I want to encourage everybody who's watching this to kind of stop and take this seriously because when everybody else is growing, when we are actually growing at a fraction of the rate where everybody else is growing. And in some cases, we're declining in an absolute sense, not just in a relative sense anymore. We are the frog being boiled without realizing it. So, Dr. Shiri Breznitz, the good Breznitz. I love your husband by the way, so that's why I can say that. The good Breznitz, thank you so much for taking time out of your academic schedule this year to be the Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar and thank you so much for spending the last hour talking to us about something remarkably important to all of us in a wonderfully understandable way. Please join me in thanking Dr. Breznitz.

(Applause)

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