Good morning.
It's great to be in Ottawa today representing the University of Waterloo and the Waterloo Accelerator Centre.
As the funding and facilitation of science and technology is in part the subject of today's meeting, I'd like to give you a snapshot overview of the success and challenges of our commercialization efforts in the Region of Waterloo and in Canada's technology triangle, which makes up the cities of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, and Guelph, Ontario. My perspective comes from the other Silicon Valley North.
Waterloo is considered to be one of North America's leading concentrations of technology players, commercialization expertise, technology transfer, venture and early-stage capital, and of course innovation. If you broaden the Waterloo region definition to include the city of Guelph, we are referred to as Canada's technology triangle, or CTT , and we're recently described in the British journal Regional Studies as one of the most dynamic sources of high-technology activity in North America.
Waterloo's information, communication, and technology sector is going from strength from strength. In 2004 we were home to 327 high-tech companies, and by 2008 we have grown to 514. The ICT sector alone employs 13,000 people, or 10% of the region's workforce, and generates $13 billion in revenue annually.
Notably, 250 of these companies are University of Waterloo spinoffs. Our region boasts more than 150 research institutions, including the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing. As of 2006, these institutes accounted for $344 million in private sector research and development. Also, at a time when venture capital is difficult to raise, in 2007 we saw over $300 million invested in local startups.
I am bombarding you with these facts and figures today because we like to think that the University of Waterloo has played a role in the success of Canada's technology triangle and Waterloo region's technology cluster, and we think the intellectual property ownership policy at the University of Waterloo has had something to do with it.
Basically, what we tell our faculty and students is that we don't own their brains, and if they develop intellectual property, they own it. It's a pretty simple policy: if you create it, it's yours. Inventors own their inventions and are free to commercialize and profit from them. We believe that inventor-ownership attracts the kinds of entrepreneurial researchers who have made Waterloo region and the University of Waterloo successful.
I come before you today armed with a few examples.
Since the sale of Cognos Inc. to IBM last year, Open Text Corp., a University of Waterloo spinoff, is now Canada's largest independent software company, with more than 3,000 employees worldwide. Research In Motion, the BlackBerry company, has over 5,000 employees within a few blocks of the University of Waterloo. They are great examples of what successful commercialization can do for a community.
Other successful spinoffs such as DALSA, Descartes, Virtek, and Northern Digital employ more than 1,600 people in Waterloo, and our region is hungry for more. At any given time we are looking for about 2,000 highly skilled workers, and at this point RIM alone are looking for 500 employees in Waterloo.
The University of Waterloo is also actively involved in incubating entrepreneurial startups, with our Accelerator Centre located in the university's research and technology park. By this September, we will have 35 companies in the Accelerator Centre, which speaks well to the entrepreneurial activity in Waterloo.
Our system of cooperative education has produced students who are finely tuned to the needs of our high-tech enterprises in Waterloo, and their efforts have attracted the attention of heavyweights, such as Sybase and Google, who have gone on to establish large offices in the research and technology park.
The University of Waterloo is known as the national leader in technology transfer from the classroom to the marketplace. We believe our creator-owned intellectual property policy, along with fostering an environment where collaboration is encouraged, has resulted in our success as a university and as a community.
Waterloo has shown that if you can create an environment where venture capitalists are comfortable with injecting funding into an entrepreneurial project, you can open the floodgates to economic activity, job creation, and innovation. The university is a big part of this environment, but so is the government at all levels.
At Waterloo, we believe that an environment that actively promotes and fosters research and its commercialization, coupled with an environment that facilitates commercialization through organizations such as the Accelerator Centre, provides tangible results in terms of commercialization of research and the resulting economic activity of our spinoff companies, which create jobs in order to commercialize the research.
What we need from the various levels of government in order to maintain these levels of research commercialization and the resulting economic development that has been seen in Waterloo can be summarized as follows:
Number one is policies at the federal level that provide for protection of the intellectual property that is developed by our researchers, so that we can attract investment capital.
Number two is continued funding at the federal and provincial levels for university research.
Number three is federal and provincial programs and tax incentives that provide incentives for investors to invest in high-risk, early-stage university spinoff companies.
Thank you for your time today. I look forward to your questions.