Great. Thank you, Mark.
As mentioned, I'm the director general within ISED's science and innovation sector. We work closely with the granting councils and the post-secondary education sector.
Mark has started off with a good overview of the overarching context for IP. In my remarks I will try to narrow in on the topic of IP and technology transfer in the post-secondary education sector.
I prepared my remarks in English, but I would be happy to answer questions asked in French.
Post-secondary institutions serve a variety of important functions, including training, the creation of scientific knowledge, and the transfer of that knowledge to those best placed to put it to use. We'll call that “technology transfer”.
IP protection is an important component of technology transfer because it allows academic researchers to publish their research while still providing industrial partners with the incentive to commercialize. Technology transfer offices—we'll call them TTOs—facilitate technology transfer activities at universities and colleges. These can be as varied as managing IP, developing and supporting partnerships between academia and knowledge users, and supporting entrepreneurship and company growth. Universities and colleges play different roles in the mobilization of knowledge, with university research often driven by researcher and student curiosity, and college applied research driven largely by industry needs.
As we've been asked to be brief, in this presentation, I'll focus on university technology transfer.
The Government of Canada provides support for technology transfer through the federal granting agencies, NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, including many programs designed to encourage post-secondary and private sector research collaborations. These seek to bring a wide range of research and technical expertise to bear on specific industrial challenges. These are also about exposing researchers to these industry needs.
These include several NSERC programs under the NSERC strategy for partnerships and innovation; the tri-council business-led networks of centres of excellence and the centres of excellence for commercialization and research programs, generally known as the BL-NCE and the CECR programs; as well as the Mitacs scientific internship program, which received significant sums of money in the last budget. Many of these programs include the training of highly qualified personnel as another means to help ensure knowledge is also mobilized into the workforce.
I'll mention another program, the research support fund, formerly known as the indirect costs program for those familiar with that. This is a tri-agency program that provides Canadian post-secondary institutions with support to help them defray the indirect costs of research that is funded by the federal granting councils. Under this program, the Government of Canada directly supports costs related to technology transfer, including the creation, expansion, and maintenance of a TTO, and costs associated with IP protection and supporting industry partnerships.
Metrics are an ongoing challenge in technology transfer. There are no available metrics that fully capture the economic impact of technology activities at post-secondary institutions on a national scale. Instead, we tend to follow narrower outcomes related to IP, which are the easiest to measure. You will hear talk of and we'll keep track of things such as patents, licences, start-ups created, and licensing revenue generated.
There can be some downsides associated with the focus on those kinds of metrics, dangers that TTOs can sometimes be pushed to chase those kinds of metrics, sometimes at the cost of the quality of the broader objective of transferring technology.
The majority of Canadian university TTOs, when last asked, suggested that these common IP metrics, while the best that we have in some ways, don't effectively measure the full extent of what they do in their offices. That also reflects some evolution that's taken place in recent years over the way TTOs work. Many of them are now more focused on other technology transfer outcomes that are not IP-related but better suited to advance the Canadian economy in the long run. These are things like forming academic industrial partnerships and transfer through HQP, highly qualified personnel, of skills to the workplace.
In terms of IP ownership policies, there is no national uniform policy governing IP. I know this is an issue you're interested in. Provincial governments have the jurisdiction to set IP policy at post-secondary institutions. The majority of these will actually defer to the institutions to set their own policies, which in turn are often embedded in faculty collective agreements.
This has led to an overall diversity of approaches to intellectual property protection policies, which can be more or less summarized in two broad approaches. There are the inventor-owned policies and the university-owned policies. Both of them are associated with high-quality technology transfer outcomes, or they can be. Some universities have a policy that contains features of both. We refer to this as the joint ownership approach, where both the inventor and the institution share IP rights.
With respect to federally funded research, the granting councils do not require institutions to follow any particular IP policy. With respect to community colleges, the role of applied research in Canadian colleges is to help solve an industry problem. Canadian colleges normally do not own their IP. It remains with the industrial partner.
In terms of a comparison of IP ownership models, for a university that adopts an inventor-owned IP policy, the research or inventor has the right to decide whether to sign over his or her IP to an industrial partner. Some of the advantages of this approach are that it can be highly motivating for academics. It encourages them to get more actively involved in the commercialization of their research. It also gives them flexibility to adjust to the licensing preferences of the firm that they're dealing with. In contrast, a TTO may be constrained by broader institutional policies.
On the downside, the success of this approach can be highly dependent on the individual concerned and whether they have the kinds of skills, the ability, and the motivation to commercialize their IP and/or launch a successful start-up. This model assumes that researchers are motivated by the concept of capturing monetary benefits from the results of their research. It can also increase the complexity of negotiating licensing agreements due often to the inventor's lack of experience in this area.
Now we'll look at the university-owned ownership model. For a university that adopts a university-owned IP policy, the university has the right to sell or retain the inventor's IP once it's disclosed. Some advantages of this policy are that it seeks to simplify the process of commercializing and licensing by centralizing ownership and taking maximum advantage of the expertise in the TTO. It also gives universities flexibility to pool the licensing of relevant IP that may have been invented by different researchers from diverse fields. They might package different patents together and sell them to an appropriate company that could take advantage of that. This policy recognizes that researchers may not have the interest or expertise to further develop and commercialize their intellectual property independently.
On the downside, this kind of policy can create a barrier to technology transfer when university TTOs, many of which operate on cost-recovery models, sometimes tend to overvalue IP in terms of trying to maximize their financial benefits. TTOs can also be less nimble and have less flexibility to adjust to the licensing preferences of an individual firm than an inventor would, or a single person would. Inventors may be less inclined under this policy to be involved in this critical stage of developing the technology towards commercialization. This is the counter-side of the motivation issue that was mentioned in the inventor-owned model.
We have some examples of international experience. There's a lot of interest in the United States, where IP ownership rights for government-funded university research have been governed by the Bayh-Dole Act since 1980. This act essentially states that the rights to inventions resulting from federally funded research belong exclusively to universities and are subject to a number of obligations regarding disclosure and royalty sharing.
The Bayh-Dole Act has often been seen as an important catalyst for the increases in patenting and licensing activity that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. It's hard to say unambiguously that this is responsible for that in the sense that this strong, upward trend in patenting and licensing did begin before the implementation of the act. You could attribute many elements of this increase to other factors, for example, the broader scope of patentable inventions, and the fact that there was an increasing propensity to patent over this time, and just the nature of technological progress that took place in certain fields. Bio-medical sciences, for example, really picked up a lot in the eighties and nineties.
Other countries, such as the U.K., Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Norway, all maintain a university-owned IP model. In Australia, as in Canada, universities are able to develop their own policies. The majority of these use a university-owned IP model. Italy and Sweden use a professor-privilege IP policy in which IP ownership remains with the inventor.
Overall, we would say there's little evidence that the policy governing who owns the IP rights of an innovation has an overriding impact on the success of technology transfer between institutions and industry as measured by the volume of patents and licences. As mentioned before, there are successful examples of both models of ownership. I'll give you a couple of examples. The University of Waterloo is often cited as an example of an inventor-owned policy that's very effective. UBC would be an example of a university-owned model that works very well. They're both considered to be leaders from a technology transfer perspective.
Other factors that are often pointed to as contributing to the success of technology transfer would include things like how many resources a university puts towards its technology transfer office and towards these activities in general, and the quality of contractual agreements. As well, overall the level of education and awareness about the importance of intellectual property protection and commercialization, as well as overall culture, are seen as very important. Waterloo is an example of a university in which there is a strong culture of entrepreneurship that supports and values technology transfer, and that culture has a strong influence as well.
Some other channels of technology transfer can be arguably as important or more important than IP licensing. As mentioned before, there is this idea of movement of people, students in particular, from universities to the private sector or public sectors and the know-how they bring with them. Company creation is another mechanism. There is publication of research results and interactions through things like meetings and conferences. We mentioned the Mitacs internships that create connections between universities and firms, and there are just general research partnerships and co-operative research centres.
I'm going to turn it over to Konstantinos now.
