Yes, there are a couple of things.
One of the things about some of the most famous universities in the United States, and not in all areas of business—there isn't a shoe that will fit all feet, in some respects—but in information technology and communications and so on, is that quite a number, and I know particularly of a number of cases, don't patent.
They say they teach, they write papers, and they work with their graduates out there. If their graduates are having challenges and problems, they'll work on those challenges and problems. And they'll wait for them to patent whatever information is valuable to them, because they're the ones who need to use it. They're not into this big worry about patenting in the university itself. That's not true in every area in the universities, but it is true.
The other thing is that the culture, which I talked about, is very different in different countries in the world. I'll pick the United States, because they're the biggest player and the most successful player in the knowledge-based economy.
The way they operate is that they pay their faculty for the academic year, and they expect them to get out somewhere in society for the remaining four months, or whatever it is, and get into the value exchange—get value in exchange for the value they're creating. So their university faculty members are all in commerce.
Our tenured faculty members, I often say, and not just jokingly, but seriously, have everything guaranteed 12 months of the year until four years after they're dead. They're not in commerce at all. In fact, they are averse to commerce. They don't want to be asked, “Who is your customer?” They'll hit you in the face if you ask them that question. I live in that environment.
They find it very hard to accept that some of those great universities in the United States, such as MIT.... I should say that MIT is a technical institution with 10,000 students. I have compared it to U of T, with 70,000 students. U of T is 30 years older than MIT.
MIT had a 10% club at one stage. A faculty member who belonged to that club was really honoured. That would be a faculty member for whom the remuneration from MIT was less than 10% of his take. In Canada we would say that this would totally contaminate the academic road, because you're being driven by other dollars and other funds and things like that. But guess what? MIT does better than the U of T on nearly every academic front we can measure. U of T has had about seven Nobel Prize winners in its history. Half of them have been in the U.S. They were their graduates who went to the U.S. MIT has had something like 67. They currently have nine on the faculty, and U of T has none.
Has this contamination of the commercial world made them non-academic? Not at all. This is about the culture, you see. There's a belief about being pure, which is not true, but we can't examine it, and that's a big one for us.