Thank you very much for inviting McMaster University to participate in the standing committee's study on the effectiveness of the current intellectual property regime in Canada.
I will be speaking from the perspective of our office that supports and services the research administration area of the university. In this capacity our office offers a variety of functions related to the management of the university's intellectual property, including negotiating the rights to intellectual property generated at the university through research collaborations with industry; assessing inventions derived from university research, and filing for intellectual property protection; and developing and implementing commercialization strategies for such intellectual property with respect to licensing or startup potential.
The standing committee's examination of Canada's intellectual property regime and innovation support mechanisms is very much welcomed, as McMaster University, through its VP research office, is currently undergoing a review of its policies and procedures in these areas.
That being said, it should be noted that commercialization of technology created at the university is auxiliary to the university's core mission of teaching, research, and scholarly publications. As such, the resources to undertake the commercialization of university technologies are often quite modest and becoming more so with the overall budget pressures that all universities are facing.
University-created technologies are typically at a very early stage of development, where the technical market risks are high and uncertain, and the path to commercialization is long and arduous. In general, given the university's small patent budgets and the high cost of drafting and prosecuting patent applications, as well as the long time to issuance of such patents in the Canadian system, very few patents can be supported by the university on its own. However, most sources of government funding for further research and development at the university toward a commercialization end point requires some form of intellectual property protection, typically in the form of a patent.
The current practice of McMaster University is to initiate patent filings. But without a source of additional funding, be it an industrial partner, investor, or granting agency, many applications become abandoned before commercialization is realized. These issues are magnified in the biotech and health sciences sectors, which typically require not just a single patent but a family of well-protected patents for commercialization, which universities are ill-suited to build. This can result in stifling the development of truly innovative products, or causing many of these innovative ideas to be sold early to large multinationals, with limited benefit to the Canadian economy.
For other sectors, such as software, we typically do not file any patent applications due to the rapid change of technology advancements in this sector. The need to invest limited dollars in being first to market, versus using patents, is a form of gaining competitive advantage.
An additional consideration is the cost of filing for patent protection in Canada. For many inventions the market opportunity is much larger in the United States or other international markets. While McMaster currently supports prosecution of its patent applications in Canada, we are evaluating the value and benefit of this strategy. We know of other universities that do not file in Canada as a general rule.
Recent encouragement has been given to universities from government to extract additional value from their technology portfolios, but the value universities should be measured by needs to extend beyond simply generating revenue from university technology. It should include the impact we have on job creation, increased company productivity through research collaborations, and training of student entrepreneurs.
A university can build a culture of applied research commercialization through supporting faculty members' interests in innovation technology transfer. A university can also serve as a major component in the innovation ecosystem that encompasses elements internal to the university, as well as external parties that are supportive and knowledgeable about innovation.
We would encourage the Government of Canada to investigate ways to cluster the material resources, such as funding, equipment, and facilities; the human capital, such as faculty, staff, students, and industry researchers; and the institutional elements, such as university infrastructure, government-funded centres of excellence, funding agencies, and the co-location of industrial partners. Those are constituent elements of the innovation ecosystem needed by entrepreneurs and companies to support their endeavours.
Ontario currently has a number of successful innovation ecosystems centred around the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, and Communitech at the University of Waterloo, but there's a need for more. The university can play a significant role in the innovation ecosystem through its support of basic and applied research, its performance in research contracts with industrial sponsors, its training of highly qualified personnel, and early-stage technology transfer. But further support would be welcomed to develop ecosystems that include more entrepreneurial education, larger pools of funds to support both research and patents, development of start-up service providers, and fostering executive mentorship programs.
The failure to leverage the value of the investments made by university research deprives both the university and society at large of benefits to which they are both entitled.
Thank you.