Working Paper October, 2020 Chelsea Tao and Mariana Valverde Commercializing Inventions at the University of Toronto What is a university? In Canada, as elsewhere, it is a centre for research and teaching, supported in part by public funds. It is also an employer, a producer of images, a subject of rankings, a real estate owner, a generator of revenues, and a hub in global networks of value and aspiration. But how does a university work? What exactly does it do? What are the powers and pressures, the practices and networks that constitute contemporary university worlds? An interdisciplinary team of faculty at the University of Toronto, we seek to discover the many worlds of our own institution, in collaboration with graduate and undergraduate students. We foreground the everyday experience of people who work or study in different corners of the institution, who live in its shadow, or respond to its public face. A pilot phase 2019-2021 has been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Discovery Grant #430-2019-00054 For more information about the project please contact
[email protected] Visit our website at http://universityworlds.ca/ To cite this paper: Tao, Chelsea and Mariana Valverde. (2020) “Commercializing Inventions at the University of Toronto”. Working Paper 4, Discovering University Worlds, University of Toronto. 2 Abstract Universities all over the world have been pressured for several decades, and in turn have pressured their researchers, to help commercialize university inventions, mainly through setting up new corporations and/or selling intellectual property rights to existing corporations.