According to a glossy pamphlet provided by university administration, U of T professor Dave Boocock is having great success with the commercialization of his biodiesel product, Bioxx. But the organization that helped him get started, the University of Toronto Innovation Foundation (UTIF), has been replaced.
“The projections for that business [UTIF] said that it would make money or at least break even. It didn’t,” said Catherine Riggall, vice president, business affairs. In fact, UTIF lost $11 million in university funds over three years. This spring, Governing Council created a new department to replaced UTIF: Innovations at the University of Toronto (IUT).
From their shiny new office at the MaRS Centre, IUT will help researchers disclose their inventions, apply for patents, and launch business ventures. IUT will not, however, invest in start-up companies, as UTIF did. With essentially the same staff as UTIF, IUT has slightly less funding, at about $3 million per year.
Dr. Tim McTiernan has taken the helm as executive director. Former assistant deputy minister in the Ministry of Research and Innovation, McTiernan’s work is the commercialization of research. But his idea of commercialization is broad.
“It is working not just for business purposes but for areas like health service and public service delivery,” he said. “And if you think about it in the broadest possible context, translating work that’s underway in the arts and humanities into community activities.”
Riggall recommended the restructuring in part because she thinks that the University of Toronto is lagging behind similar universities in commercializing research.
“We don’t think we’re getting enough compared to other universities, considering the size and the number of researchers we have here and the success of our researchers,” she said.
Coralie D’Souza, an undergraduate representative on Governing Council, also supports the changes, and has ideas of her own for advisory committees that will steer IUT. Their makeup has not yet been decided.
“What I suggested at planning and budget is that we should be tapping into our business school, Rotman,” she said. “We’ve got some of the brightest minds there and we should be using them to look at how we are promoting these products.”
She also thinks that there should be student representation on the councils, to keep IUT accountable, and also because “it’s an opportunity for students to learn and observe how these sorts of organizations function, from an educational perspective.”
But with all the excitement over commercialization and applied research, some worry that more theoretical work will be neglected. It’s something that McTiernan has been thinking about.
“Applied research without attention to sustaining general research across a range of disciplines is a short-term exercise,” he said. “It’s very hard to go back to the public purse over and over again and ask for money without saying there is value to the average taxpayer, but there’s also an understanding that a lot of the truly great discoveries in the world that have changed the way we act, we behave, and the quality of our lives are ones that can’t be pre-planned.”
