Skip to content

‹ CFIR · Research

The role of venture capital funds in dissemination and development of innovation in Canada.

Marat Ressin · York Entrepreneurship Development Institute · Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, August 2025

At a glance

Ten provinces analysed. Venture capital, firm survival and patent activity move together — and cluster in four.

About this paper

Marat Ressin maps where venture capital sits in Canada, and how that pattern lines up with where companies survive and where patents are filed. Working from Canadian statistical databases and venture-fund reporting, the paper measures venture activity, business-survival and patent-approval rates province by province, then studies how they move together.

The picture is uneven: venture capital concentrates in four provinces — Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta — while the other six operate in a much thinner-capital environment. Ressin reads that concentration as a driver of regional imbalance in innovation, and closes with recommendations for spreading capital and acceleration support more widely.

VENTURE CAPITAL ยท BY PROVINCE QCNLBCNUNTNBNSSKABPEYTMBON Four provinces hold most of the capital. Concentrated Thin capital
How venture capital sits across the provinces — the four in red carry the bulk, the other six run on much thinner capital. Data from Marat Ressin (2025), Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
move together Venturecapital Firmsurvival Patentactivity
The paper measures three signals province by province — and finds they rise and fall together. Data from Marat Ressin (2025), Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Read the paper

The article is published open access, and is reproduced here unchanged.

Citation

Ressin, M. (2025). The role of venture capital funds in dissemination and development of innovation in Canada. Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 14(1), Article 90. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13731-025-00555-z

Funding

Funded by Canadian Foundationfor Innovation and Research

Licence & attribution

© The Author(s) 2025. Made available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): it may be shared and redistributed for non-commercial purposes with credit, and it is reproduced here unchanged, with no derivative made.

To reuse, credit: “The role of venture capital funds in dissemination and development of innovation in Canada” by Marat Ressin, Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2025), licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.