Research

Principal Investigators: Shiri Breznitz and David Doloreux

Geographical proximity for innovation and establishment of knowledge transfer relationships in metropolitan areas is well documented in the literature, and a wide stream of research identified the importance of geography in organizing and supporting innovation (Boschma, 2005; Torre and Rallet, 2008; Ballant et al., 2015). Most of the research on industrial clusters and agglomeration economies has assumed that the patterns forged by co-location in a metropolitan area apply uniformly within that space (Delgado, 2020). Thus, most of the research has adopted a macro-level perspective and has assumed that innovation and the exchange of knowledge in urban areas occur primarily, with actors located within the same local or regional boundaries, such as a metropolitan region or city, within a cluster or regional innovation system (Fritsch and Wyrwich, 2021; Florida et al., 2017).

As stressed by Roche (2020: 912) ‘cities and their neighborhoods vary in size and scope, their densities of activities and amenities, and the manner in which they facilitate or impede the movement of individuals’. Consequently, much less attention has been dedicated to intra-metropolitan dynamics despite recent studies emphasizing their importance to understand innovation and knowledge interactions within cities (Ferretti et al., 2022; Rammer et al., 2020).

With this project, our objective is to analyse how innovation is configured and shaped within a city, or what we call the micro-geography of innovation. In this context, the micro-geography of innovation refers to the analysis of organisations and configurations of innovation at a very fine level, typically focusing on specific neighborhoods within the city. It involves examining the factors and conditions that contribute to the creation and diffusion of new ideas and technologies within a particular neighborhood, as well as the potential effects of micro-geographical proximity on interactions between different actors withing these areas.

This project includes case studies from Montreal and Toronto. In phase one, interviews were conducted in the neighborhoods of Mile End and Chabanel in Montreal. In stage two we take empirical evidence from two neighborhoods in Toronto, namely the Annex and the Junction-Triangle.

Principal Investigators: Shauna Brail and Betsy Donald

Mobility is essential to urban life. It contributes to people’s ability to access work, food, education, leisure and more. Over the past decade, innovation in digital technologies has resulted in significant disruption in urban mobilities. Emerging mobility technologies, such as ride hailing, have the potential to transform how people move in cities, how mobilities are regulated and governed, and whether emerging mobility technologies contribute to, or detract from, urban economic vibrancy. 

The Digital Mobilities Lab, funded by SSHRC, explores the geographies of digital mobilities, the platform economy and cities. The project aims to develop scholarship as well as create policy and regulatory insights for governments, urban policy think-tanks, and transportation institutes.  It is a research network of scholars, government and industry collaborators, and students working to better understand the possibilities, impacts, and future-state of mobile technologies and urban transportation across Canadian cities. At the Digital Mobilities Lab, our goal is to build scholarship, advance knowledge and offer policy solutions that address the realities of the emerging platform economy in Canadian cities. Leveraging the strengths of a multidisciplinary teams, the Digital Mobilities Lab i working to better understand the possibilities, impacts, and future state of mobile technologies and urban transportation across Canadian cities.

Principal Investigator: Tom Kemeny

In many high-income countries over the last half-century, economic opportunity has become increasingly spatially selective. Big ‘superstar’ cities are attracting talent and high-income work, while other regions are falling behind. Superstar dominance seems durable, even against COVID-inspired fears of the ‘end of the city,’ since the recovery has been marked by a significant rebound of international migration into hubs like New York and the SF Bay Area. And, while we know that ‘place’ matters for all kinds of outcomes, from social mobility to health to race-based exclusion, we know much less about spatial disparities than other forms of inequality.

Drawing lessons from history, this project explores the role of major disruptive innovation in shaping spatial inequality in the US. The project considers parallels between the technologies powering the current, semiconductor-based industrial revolution and those that enabled the revolution of the late-19^th and early 20^th century. It considers how these innovations may have created new ‘frontier’ work that emerged in spatially concentrated ways, spurring spatial income disparities. And it explores how, in the mid-20th century, these forces eventually were overcome, yielding a golden age of widening prosperity.

Lessons from this work can help us understand the role of technology in the rise and fall of spatial inequality. This may be especially important as we encounter a world being transformed by AI. It also offers insights into workers’ residential mobility choices. And it can help us interpret the emerging landscape of work and opportunity in the post-COVID19 era.

Principal investigator: Shiri M. Breznitz

Since the enactment of the U.S. 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which transferred the ownership of federally funded research to universities, there has been an ongoing global debate about the benefits of university ownership of intellectual property (IP) compared with ownership by individual researchers. In recent decades, governments outside of Canada have implemented policies related to the ownership of intellectual property rights (IPR) to foster technology transfer by universities and public research organizations.1 Canada, however, is one of the only countries in the world that does not have an IP ownership policy at the federal level nor even a IPR-related policy for federally funded research. This lack of a nationwide approach in Canada creates an opportunity to study the impact of university specific commercialization policies.

While IP ownership is only one of many policies that impact higher-education technology commercialization, it is considered the framework in which other university technology commercialization policies operate. Existing studies present conflicting results about university ownership of IP: the relationship between IPR ownership and key indicators of commercialization performance is uneven at best. On the one hand, while the outcome of specific universities’ IP ownership policies might have a positive impact on income from licenses and patents, they do not seem to make much difference when it comes to the creation of companies formed because of researcher-led IP. Other university commercialization policies such as incubators, accelerators, and patent services are assumed to have a role in the successful commercialization of basic research from universities, but those pathways are poorly defined or demonstrated

To support an innovative economy that can compete on a global scale, we need research that explicitly analyzes the relationship between university commercialization policy and output. This proposed study, focused specifically on Canada, aims to advance our understanding of exactly this puzzle by conducting both quantitative and qualitative analyses.