Leveraging Investments in Higher Education R&D

Prof. Margaret Dalziel will examine the state of knowledge and international best practices on measuring the impact of investments in higher education R&D in a comparative review funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Industry Canada.

“A combination of high performance in higher education R&D on one hand, and low levels of business expenditures on R&D and waning productivity on the other, is driving interest in leveraging investments in higher education R&D to stimulate innovation and economic growth,” says Dalziel, an associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Telfer School of Management.

“To date Canada has limited experience in assessing the impact of university-industry knowledge transfer. The focus on developing valid and reliable measures of that impact comes in response to limited government resources and ever-increasing concerns for accountability.”

Dalziel will use a $17,500 SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant to examine the outcomes of various jurisdictions in terms of measuring the impact of investments in higher education R&D in innovation-related and economic terms. She will report her findings at the upcoming Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences [This link is no longer available] (May 26-June 2 in Waterloo, Ontario).

The author of several articles on university-industry technology transfer, innovation intermediaries and their impact, Dalziel in 2012 will serve on a Council of Canadian Academies expert panel [This link is no longer available] on measuring the socio-economic benefits of investments in innovations.