Good morning. I am pleased to be here today.
CRIAQ has been around for 10 years and carries out collaborative research projects with businesses, universities, research centres and so on. We have done over 100 of them. I have prepared a document in French and English to help you understand the generic intellectual property agreement.
I fully agree with Ms. Peters. As is the case in Israel, we have a single agreement that covers large and small businesses, as well as universities and research centres. For us, this agreement is a strategic tool for developing the aerospace industry.
If you look at the document, you'll see the fundamental principles of the intellectual property agreement, which is a generic document signed by everybody. It's been in place for 10 years. Our mission at CRIAQ is to increase the competitiveness of the aerospace industry and enhance a collective knowledge base through a better training of students. We have a double mission of competitiveness and training, and the two are closely related, of course.
We do this through a number of collaborative projects. We have more than 100 in our portfolio, and the value is estimated at about $110 million. We have full IP coverage for all projects, and we have training of students—graduate students and research. We do the promotion, and we have national and international collaboration. We have about 15 international projects, a number of them with India, as an example, and some with Europe.
The principles are easy to understand. The principle is that the background IP belongs to the original owner. It will always be that way, should it be an SME or a large company.
The background IP has to be declared up front. What we recommend...and we have more than 50 industrial members, of which 32 are SMEs, and we have 30 university institutions participating in our projects.
On the background IP, if it's required for the project it's put forward, but it still belongs to the owner at the end. These are the principles.
The foreground IP is owned by the project partners. The key item now is that the universities have agreed to give the industrial partners—you see it there—an exclusive worldwide royalty-free licence for aerospace applications, or, more accurately, applications in the field of interest of the industrial members, which are mainly aerospace.
This is a key item. We don't negotiate a new IP agreement. SMEs and everybody else is agreeable to this; NRC is part of it. The universities keep the intellectual property for teaching, for internal research. There are rights for publications, but they have to be agreed by industry. Publications have to circulate before they are published.
The principles are fairly simple. This 29-page agreement is relatively complex and is the result of a significant compromise between industry and universities, but that is productive. We have projects that are patentable and others that are leading to applications on products that are currently on the market.
I think this is entirely possible. We are realizing this more and more, at CRIAQ. We are working closely with NSERC and MITACS, which is currently one of our main partners in most, if not all, of our projects. One of the important aspects of our approach is that it is possible for the same project to have both excellent science and results that are applied widely in the industry. So it involves both stressing marketing and finding this combination of both factors to make Canadian industry more competitive and at the forefront of everything being done globally, especially since the global market is stronger and stronger.
Thank you very much.