Taking McGill to market (Page 2)

While the OTT has been around for over a decade, technology transfer has only become a high priority in the past few years. Before that, McGill researchers might develop technology that would find its way to the outside world, but the University itself really played no role in the marketing.

Consider, for example, William Chalmers's 1930 invention of plexiglass. Chalmers, who was working on his PhD in chemistry at the time, mixed together the ingredients for plexiglass in McGill labs but found that the University and his professors had little interest in his discovery. He pushed for a patent, which was eventually sold to Imperial Chemical Industries for $5,000. "Unfortunately, McGill was left out of the picture," Chalmers said in a 1987 McGill News interview. "I'm sorry for that, because the University contributed so much."

Other inventions have travelled from McGill to the larger world. Legendary Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist E. P. Taylor, BSc'22, LLD'77, came up with a revolutionary inspiration while still a student: the two-sided, multiple-piece toaster which he invented for his hungry fraternity brothers in the early 1920s. Most people neglect to thank McGill -- and Taylor, for that matter -- each morning over breakfast, while enjoying the benefits of his ingenuity.

Academia's relationship to the private sector began to change in the United States with the 1980 Baye-Dole Act. It stated that technologies developed with federal funding at a university belonged to that university, which then had the obligation to market the technology. Concerns about technology transfer and intellectual property arrived at McGill somewhat later, when a professor and a graduate student created their own company while using McGill resources. The University quickly realized that it had to establish and maintain clear guidelines for entrepreneurial activity on campus.

Governments here have begun to see advantages to technology transfer. Quebec recently established the Valorisation de la recherche du Québec, a body whose goal is to encourage the commercialization of research carried out in the province's universities. As for the federal government, the Expert Panel on the Commercialization of University Research released a report in May 1999, stating that the "overriding objective" of its recommendations was to "increase the return to Canada on the investment made in university research by Canadian taxpayers." At issue, it claimed, was "the commercialization of discoveries and inventions that are the result of research in Canadian universities."

As Pierre Bélanger, BEng'59, McGill Vice-Principal, Research, interprets it, "The governments in the era of a knowledge-based economy expect universities to make a contribution above that which they have made in the past, beyond training people. They are expected to produce something that has more direct economic benefits."

Of course, this expectation applies primarily to those faculties positioned to transfer marketable ideas: Science, Medicine, Engineering, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and Dentistry. In 1997 the federal government established the Canada Foundation for Innovation to strengthen research in the nation's universities; this year McGill received $61 million in CFI grants. While the CFI monies are not directly related to commercialization of research, Luc Vinet, Vice-Principal, Academic, stresses that it "provides McGill with an extraordinary infrastructure and some fantastic research advances. The benefits we'll see as a result of these grants -- in manpower, equipment, infrastructure and research money -- make industry collaboration possible."

But industry collaboration creates many new questions. For instance, what is the relationship between patenting the products of research and the old, established way of getting information out of the lab and into circulation: publishing academic papers? There is a basic conflict between the goals of academia and industry when it comes to sharing knowledge.

"In order to maintain commercial advantages, people from industry don't want to reveal what they are working on until they have a commercial item," Vinet points out, "but by and by we are finding a modus operandi to work with that." Nonetheless, he concedes, "we are on thin ice with this issue -- we need to keep our eyes on our mission as a university."

Apart from such broad (and still unresolved) philosophical issues, there are plenty of other challenges. "There is an acute need for 'incubator space,' where we could bring in research contracts and allow people to easily develop ideas if they bring in venture capital," says Tyrogene's Dr. Morag Park.

And adapting to the speed at which the private sector works, especially in the high-technology industries of computer and electrical engineering, is not easy. Vince Heyward's spin-off company, Haptech, was based on research into computer interactive design that would allow, for instance, people with visual impairments to know what is on a screen. However, he notes, "Haptech was just too slow getting out." The company was purchased last February by Immersion, an enterprise which itself grew out of research labs at the University of Southern California. Heyward remains as a consultant.

Another concern is simply making the jump from an academic research mindset to a corporate one. Siegfried Hekimi, whose genetic research into nematodes and aging led to the creation of Chronogen, notes that "when you get into a room with corporate people, even though everybody disagrees with everyone else, at the end of the day you find a way to agree." Pragmatic compromises that allow you to move forward take precedence over intellectual steadfastness. "Not everyone has the right personality to make that transition," he says.

Additionally, notes Park, "in academia you follow where your research takes you. In the pharmaceutical industry, you're very focussed. There are goals which must be met, deadlines that must be faced, and decisions that must be taken at those deadlines." This difference in mindset can be productive, she says. "Exposure to industry has been very good in that you go through the trees to the most important question. [University researchers] tend to look at all the trees along the side as we walk along."

Finally, although University attitudes and policies are increasingly supportive, they also impose a brake on entrepreneurial activity. Smith's 1995 incorporation of Bios Agriculture was "painful," he recalls, in large part because McGill was trying to establish a new way of dealing with intellectual property and the commercialization of university research. "The administration's attitude was in the process of changing. Previously, involvement with industry was seen as a stain."