Sure, and thank you for the question.
I think you're absolutely right. Every Canadian university has its own method of IP ownership, its own policy. The University of Waterloo's policy is a creator-owned policy, which is quite different from other university IP policies.
The challenge I think goes to the theme that I think we've been exploring. Collaboration is really the key, and finding ways to reduce the hurdles for effective collaboration is the important piece, so organizations like Mitacs that can broker those good, solid partnerships between a business and a university and help make those connections are good ways to advance IP. The collaborative model that Monsieur Fortin has described again is a great way to do that.
I think the challenge that many universities have in thinking about IP and in negotiating agreements with industry partners is that if you're making a complex product—a BlackBerry, for example—the number of individual patents and licensing agreements for all of the parts and all of the software...it's a very complex item. The number of agreements with individual patent owners would be quite complex.
What often happens, especially if you are a smaller company, is that you're faced with this very challenging landscape of how many agreements, how many university partners, how many individual researchers, and what other industry collaborators need to be negotiated with, so is it worth it, how quickly can it be done, and how much is it going to cost? Those are the things that I think are top of mind for companies.