Canadian Light Source - Industrial Program and Economic Impact

Industrial Program and Economic Impact

From inception, the CLS showed a "strong commitment to industrial users and private/public partnerships", with then-director Bancroft reporting "more than 40 letters of support from industry indicating that is important for what they do". This commitment has been criticised, notably by University of Saskatchewan professor Howard Woodhouse, since only two private companies provided capital funding, with the rest coming from public funds, while up to 25% of beamline time at CLS is allocated to commercial use. The CLS has an industrial group, within the larger experimental facilities division, with industrial liaison scientists who make synchrotron techniques available to a "non-traditional" user base who are not synchrotron experts. By 2007 more than 60 projects had been carried out, although in a speech in the same year, then-CLS director Bill Thomlinson said that "one of the biggest challenges for the synchrotron...is to get private users through the door", with less than 10% of time actually used by industry.

In 1999 then-Saskatoon mayor Dayday stated that "the CLS will add $122 million to Canada's GDP during construction and $12 million annually after that". An economic impact study of the two financial years 2009/10 and 10/11 showed the CLS had added $45 million per year to the Canadian GDP, or about $3 for every $1 of operating funding. The CLS has been cited as an example of the commercialization of university research endangering "other areas of scholarship and research that is perceived to be of little immediate utility for generating private monetary wealth". The CLS itself has stated that "the primary means of accessing the CLS is through a system of peer review, which ensures that the proposed science is of the highest quality and permits access to the facility to any interested researcher, regardless of regional, national, academic, industrial or governmental affiliation."