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But some of those funding efforts may increasingly end up creating IP for foreign companies. In 2016, 58 per cent of the patents granted to Canadian inventors were assigned to companies located in other countries, up from 45 per cent in 2005.

The report found a “glaring gap between invention and ownership” when studying Canada’s ability to generate returns on the patents it develops, ranking it 12th out of 17 nations on this measure.

“It’s pennies on the dollar for the amount of money you put in,” said Jim Hinton, fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

In Ottawa, federal ministers tend to use every available breath to promote job growth through “innovative” programs, often through consortiums involving university research centres. But Hinton and others say the results of such programs in terms of economic output are so weak that government officials need to reconsider how they are sold to the public.

“We have to say this is a philanthropic thing, we can’t be saying it’s generating money,” Hinton said. “The universities have oversold what they’re able to deliver on.”

The reasons for the shortcoming, if viewed that way, are complicated. Part of the problem, observers say, is that university professors are afforded an immense amount of discretion on which companies they partner with for research, and there is minimal oversight about who they partner with and how. The approach to intellectual property, and who ultimately keeps it, also differs from one university to the next.