Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm John McDougall, president of the National Research Council. Thank you for the invitation to appear. I look forward to the discussions today.
As you probably know, the National Research Council was established about 100 years ago, almost, in 1916. It was done so under an act of the Government of Canada. The purpose was really to support economic development in Canada through technology and innovation, in essence to help build Canada's industrial infrastructure and maintain our productivity and competitiveness.
At this point in time, the National Research Council operates with an aggregate budget of roughly $900 million, of which about $150 million comes from industrial and other government departmental sources. We're the largest organization of our kind in Canada, with facilities across the country, about 4,000 permanent staff, and 1,400 or 1,500 staff who would be classified as visiting workers.
Our business includes fee-for-service work, collaborative work, and consortia-based work. We also do some internal projects, and of course we have the very well-known industrial research assistance program that provides grants and other support to emerging enterprises to help them with their technology development.
I'm interested, obviously, in this discussion because IP really is what our business boils down to be. It's about knowledge and know-how. It's the core of what a research and development organization really does. We're trying to develop knowledge and know-how that effectively can be applied, but importantly, in our case, because we're a mission-oriented type of organization, explicitly for the benefit of Canada, and that means both social and economic.
IP, as you know, includes invention and know-how and in NRC's case it's that which is created at NRC. Under the law, employees are required to disclose all IP that derives from their work to NRC. NRC owns it and has the full authority to license, sell, or otherwise deal with that intellectual property.
As president, I'm delegated the authority from the Minister of Industry, under the Public Servants Inventions Act, for the administration and control of our inventions and patents, but disposition of intellectual property in the form of copyright actually requires an order in council under the Financial Administration Act.
When we're working with IP, our job, of course, is to extract the maximum value we can from it for the benefit of Canada—not for the benefit of NRC but for the benefit of Canada. Whether we're developing ourselves or co-developing with third parties, right from the beginning, we have to think about the strategic implications of the intellectual property that will arise. Our IP strategy is developed really on a program-by-program basis.
In our protection mode, we may choose to apply different forms of intellectual property. We may patent. We may simply end up with tacit knowledge and know-how, which is critically important. We may choose to operate with trade secrets so, in fact, we don't release it because that may be the better competitive strategy for Canada. Obviously, in our contractual arrangements, because we deal with many third parties, we have to build in the appropriate clauses and safeguards to enable us to protect.
When time comes to look at transfer, we may license. We may sell. We may, again, choose to retain because the benefits are more appropriate that way. But retention doesn't necessarily mean that we limit its application. It simply means that we maintain control, so that in fact it doesn't slip away from the benefit to Canada.
When we have agreements in place, we then have an obligation to administer them. We need good processes to make sure that we monitor, evaluate, update, collect what to do, and audit that people are reporting correctly. Where necessary, we also have to be willing to enforce our obligations.
So that's a backgrounder. I'm not trying to raise any particular issues at this time. I'm happy to deal with any that the committee may wish to raise.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.