I'll start with the number of patents sitting on a shelf in post-secondary institutions. That's a challenge, and it's recognized pretty well, even within post-secondary institutions themselves. They recognize that there's huge value in the patents that exist there; so technology transfer, yes, is a challenge. There are probably things out there that could easily be commercialized if they were just readily available in terms that a company could access.
A patent filing is not necessarily enough to make a decision on whether or not you have a valid potential product or not. You certainly need more information than that. Often patent filings are a little limited. So the relationship between the patent filing and what the journal entries or the citations are, or how that product might be used, or the projections, is important as well.
I think that maybe an arrangement between government and post-secondary institutions—and industry, for that matter—to create some sort of index where these could be accessed easily would do a lot for technology transfer.