Private Sector-Financed Research Activities at Canadian Universities: Distribution and Recent Trends

The mandate of universities includes the pursuit of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge through education and training, and the dissemination of knowledge in the community. To fulfill that mandate, in particular in terms of research activities, they are increasingly relying on partnerships with the private sector, business enterprises and the private non-profit sector being a growing source of research financing. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the evolution of private sector research funding at Canadian universities over the past twelve years. Its objective is to document the profile of the universities which most attract private sector research financing, and to serve as the basis for a study in progress on best practices in university-industry research contracting. Findings confirm the increasing concentration of research in the largest, more research intensive universities in Canada. They also show that although the share of private sector financed research at universities is highest in the largest universities with large graduate programs in the sciences, especially in health and in mathematics and physics, that share seems to be relatively independent of academic excellence. Over time, the private sector orientation of research at the largest universities has grown at a slightly higher rate than at the smaller universities, but the difference is not statistically 21 Estimated from Table 2, Statistics Canada (1998b). significative. When controlling for current private sector research orientations and changes in total sponsored research budgets, changes in private sector orientation seem to favour the smaller universities. 1