The intellectual property policy at Waterloo allows the creator to own it. If a professor or a graduate student work on a project together, they co-own it. If one of them decides to commercialize, they sit together with the help of our commercialization office and decide how any profits and revenues from the project will be split. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, but there's a lot of interest in creating new knowledge, so that's what's good about it.
In the case of start-ups, many of our undergraduate students, and increasingly more of our graduate students, are starting companies from their theses. We support them and provide them, again from the WatCo office, the Waterloo commercialization office, with opportunities for them to work. They do a project with industry. There are opportunities for agreements to be set up between the professor and his or her group together with companies.
In the field of technology, you don't really have to buy all IP, you need to license it because it's changing. In two years it's probably obsolete. What professors do is they license the IP for a number of years, and then they can license it to multiple different companies. The platform technologies can have different applications, so the core may be the same, the source may be the same, and you can just change it with applications.