I would go on the record as saying that we share your concern. Our mandate is to fund research and training in social sciences and humanities in Canada and to provide advice to government. Our view is that this is best applied to research that's further upstream in terms of the development of novel ideas and approaches. That doesn't mean we don't fund more applied research, or research that results in patents or copyrights or other forms of protection, but we are, through our own practices and our own regulations, silent on how that will be applied properly by the researchers themselves and by the universities or the colleges where they work.
We have an interest, and we've done research, in areas around commercialization and IP transfer. I'd be happy to talk further about that, about some of the work that is being done on clusters and incubation. I myself am doing some work currently on open innovation versus more closed models.
That's the beauty of SSHRC, in a sense. We are the agency that's funded in fact to reflect on some of the practices and some of the priorities and some of the policies that you're referring to in your comments that would direct or otherwise assist the movement of intellectual property into the private sector. I'll just repeat that, fundamentally, our view is that our role is best served by funding more open research at the upper end.
One anecdote I'll give you, which I've repeated many times, is based on a study that was done a few years ago. Looking at the first page of patent applications in the U.S., and looking at the citations to previous research on the first page of patent applications—I don't know how many they looked at in this research, maybe 5,000—70% of the citations came from U.S. publicly funded institutions. In other words, basic science was driving the innovation that was subsequently put forward for protection.
So we have an absolutely critical role to play in the front end of this process.