Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I think it's pretty obvious that the common theme coming through here is collaboration: collaboration among you as partners and also between industry and the post-secondary institutions.
I'm from the Waterloo region as well. With my colleague, Peter Braid, I'm very proud to have worked with maybe all of you, or almost all of you—I haven't met Mr. Fortin.
Communitech has a great record in the Waterloo region, and one of the things I would like Ms. Peters and Mr. Kolada to comment on is the whole issue of IP as it relates to the university. The University of Waterloo has a regime that is a little different as it relates to intellectual property protection. You've given us the example of Desire2Learn. We know about RIM and the fact that these companies were started by students before they graduated.
There's some support for the idea that because of the freedom of intellectual property ownership following the producer, it would create more opportunities for commercialization, yet I noticed that in Mr. Kolada's comments he said that universities have “inconsistent” IP licensing. He went on to say that it creates some challenges.
Ms. Peters, could you just comment on your experience working in an incubator setting with many emerging high-tech companies, a number of them coming from the University of Waterloo and that regime, and how, in your view, that has affected commercialization? Maybe Mr. Kolada could comment from the other perspective. We had witnesses here—I believe last week—who commented on the fact that there are some areas internationally where there is a common IP regime across the university spectrum, and I don't see that happening quickly here.
I just wondered if you could follow up on those points. Thanks.