The difference between Canada and the U.S. is the fact that the U.S. did standardize academic and industry agreements through the Bayh-Dole Act quite a few years ago. Those have been standardized. In Canada it's a grab bag of different universities having different decisions as to who owns which piece of IP and how they're going to do it.
I think the most important thing that we need to look at.... I think it would be very difficult to get all the universities to come to a standardized agreement. I've been told, when I started my report, to give it up—that they tried it 10 years ago and it didn't happen—so my argument would then be to look at the legal agreements. Let's find some more standardized legal agreements that could be used across the universities, maybe through some template clauses, to simplify things at the stage where industry comes in with the universities and starts meeting and negotiating some of these agreements, rather than trying to get all the universities to change the rules.
I think programs such as the FedDev programs have worked with universities to bring industry together with universities. I think they need to look very carefully at the ownership of IP. This is an issue about the culture at universities and how the universities have been seeing IP as what we call “Google chasers”. They're all looking for that one big deal that is going to give them lots of new revenue. That happens maybe once every 20 years, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, where there might be a big drug, but as we know, one patent does not a product make. The universities need to understand that a little more. Some of the programs that we initiate, through the FedDev programs and such, could try to incentivize the universities to change how they do the agreements with industry.
Consortiums are also a great way to work, and there have been some really good examples of consortiums in which several universities get together. This has happened in the aerospace industry in Quebec, a very good model that has been copied internationally. I'm told it took something like four years to hammer out. They got several universities together and hammered out what you'd call a pre-existing agreement so that every time an aerospace company is doing a deal with a university, they don't have to go back over the same ground over and over again. I think consortiums are a great way. Government should really try to help create more consortiums--industry-academic consortiums--in a number of different sectors, and use the aerospace sector as a good model.