U of T Entrepreneurship recognized among global top 5 business incubators at World Incubation Summit

Jon French, Director, University of Toronto Entrepreneurship, was in Ghent this week to participate in the World Incubation Summit and bring home University of Toronto’s World Top 5 University Business Incubator award.

University of Toronto was recognized as one of the world’s top five university business incubators by UBI Global in its latest world benchmark study.

In its 2021-2022 study, UBI Global – a Swedish-based innovation intelligence company with more than 1,000 member organizations – assessed 1895 organizations from 90 countries.

The top organizations were benchmarked across 21 key performance indicators against their global peers based on the value they provide to their innovation ecosystems and client startups.

“The UBI ranking is a reinforcement of all the great work that so many U of T students, faculty, and alumni entrepreneurs have been doing,” says French. “It’s a recognition of how we fare against the best in the world.”

The ranking is particularly notable since UBI is one of the only organizations examining economic and social impact in its global assessment of post-secondary entrepreneurship.

“The approach that UBI takes is quite holistic – they measure hard metrics, including funding raised and jobs created, but they also take a look at criteria such as where the mentor network is coming from and how engaged the university’s alumni are,” French says, noting that U of T scored high on all such indicators in the UBI report and takes pride in supporting innovators at all stages of their journey – everyone from idea-stage student entrepreneurs to faculty members and PhD researchers seeking to commercialize their work.

Other Canadian universities also ranked highly in their categories in the UBI report, including incubators from McGill University, York University, Memorial University and École de technologie supérieure.

Many of the U of T-backed success stories flagged for the UBI survey stemmed from the university’s strength in leading-edge research fields such as quantum computing, biotech, clean tech, advanced manufacturing and machine learning. In particular, French points to the recent announcement of $40 million in federal funding for U of T startup Xanadu Quantum Technologies – an alumnus of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) at the Rotman School of Management that was founded by former U of T post-doctoral physics researcher Christian Weedbrook – and the more than 150 ventures supported annually by the Health Innovation Hub (H2i).

Connect with U of T at Collision this June.

U of T is proud to partner with Collision, North America’s fastest-growing tech conference again this year. Meet our team at booth E156 near Centre Stage to find out why U of T is the place to innovate.