In the last month, the University of British Columbia has scored eighth, 27th and 36th in surveys that compare the world’s best research universities.
In a report released yesterday, UBC placed eighth in a survey of U.S. and Canadian institutions’ ability to turn research into commercially viable products and companies. The closest Canadian university was McGill University which ranked 23rd. The study is published by the Milken Institute, a nonprofit, independent U.S. economic think tank, and looks at the innovation pipeline of universities to assess their performance in technology transfer and commercialization.
The study, Mind to Market: A Global Analysis of University Biotechnology Transfer and Commercialization, analyzes key measures including patents issued, licensing income and spin-off companies. At the head of the list for tech transfer is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the University of California system and the California Institute of Technology following in second and third place.
The study comes on the heels of UBC attaining rankings of 27 in Newsweek Magazine’s Aug. 21 survey of the world’s top 50 universities and 36 in the fourth annual Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities, a survey recognized by the Economist as being “the most widely used annual ranking of world universities.” Only the University of Toronto was ranked higher than UBC among Canadian universities.
“We’re delighted to see the research enterprise at UBC being recognized in a wide variety of success measurements,” says John Hepburn, Vice-President, Research.
“These latest rankings certainly give a strong endorsement of our ability as Canada’s global university to both create new knowledge and to transfer it to the marketplaces of ideas and commerce to directly benefit people’s lives in Canada and around the world,” says Hepburn.
The Milken report comments on UBC’s “consistent performance” across each of its technology transfer indicators. Probing beyond the simple scale of an institution’s activities to report on “which universities are better positioned to capitalize on their innovation assets,” the report supports the reputation of UBC’s University-Industry Liaison Office, charged with commercialization of research, as the Canadian leader.
UBC’s 36th place in the Shanghai Jiao Tong 2006 rankings, published August 17, marks the fourth straight year that the university has placed among the world’s best universities among the 500 surveyed.
International rankings are a relatively new phenomenon, beginning with the 2002 Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings.
Indicators used in both the Newsweek and Shanghai Jiao Tong surveys include number of Nobel laureates; number of highly cited researchers; number of articles published in Nature and Science; number of articles cited in the Science Citation Index, and academic performance per faculty.
In 2005, UBC received $364 million total in external research funding for 5,963 projects. Relative to that funding, UBC faculty publish more research papers than those of any other North American university, except Harvard.
– 30 –
Details on UBC rankings are available online at:
Background
UBC University-Industry Liaison Office (UILO)
UILO was established in 1984 as the first of its kind in Canada and is a respected leader in bringing new research and technologies to market.
UBC is a leading Canadian performer for research innovation, with 61 patents issued worldwide to UBC inventions during the last year. According to the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office, UBC was the top university and fourth in Canada — behind only Nortel, Siemens and the National Research Council – in the number of U.S. patents issued between 2000 and 2004.
A report published in The Scientist in July 2005 also placed UBC ninth among North American universities, and again the top university in Canada, for the quantity and quality of U.S. patents issued in the life sciences.
UBC is again ranked as the top performing University in Canada in terms of licensing revenue. At present, UILO stewards more than 250 license and assignment agreements. Since 1984, the cumulative revenue generated by commercialized research and innovations exceeds $90 million. During 2005 to 2006, UBC received $16 million from its licensing agreements.
UBC has generated 120 spin-off companies, of which 71 are still active and provide employment for approximately 2,000 people. Half of these companies are in the life sciences sector, and UBC spin-offs have been hugely influential in developing BC’s biotech industry.
UBC spin-off companies include:
- Canada’s largest biotech company, QLT Inc.
- Neuromed Pharmaceuticals, which recently signed Canada’s largest collaboration deal of $500 million with Merck & Co.
- Westport Innovations Inc., a leading developer of environmental technologies that enable vehicles to operate on clean-burning alternative fuels
- webnames.ca Inc., a spin-off from the UBC inventors who founded the .ca domain name.
