Thank you very much.
Hello. My name is Konstantinos Georgaras.
I'm from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, a special operating agency of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. We are responsible for the administration of the intellectual property acts and the registration of IP.
I'd like to give you a brief overview of some of the counts and trends in IP and do a deeper dive into where the technologies are coming from and what those technology areas look like, where the collaboration is happening, and then finally give you a debriefing on interactions we've had with technology transfer offices to identify the barriers they have in using the IP system and what we are doing to address it.
As my colleagues have mentioned, there are a number of broader objectives for research and technology transfer, and not all of these discoveries will make it to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, rather we see a smaller subset in patenting. In our overall applications, we receive about 100,000 IP applications per year. In 2015 there were 37,000 patent applications and 22,000 patents were granted. If you look at Canadian universities patenting in our office at CIPO, the University of Alberta, for example, had 27 patent applications in fiscal year 2015-16.
Again, this is just applications in Canada. If we look at where Canadians and universities file for patents, you will see that most Canadians will file outside Canada. The top blue line on this chart represents all Canadians, and it shows that about 13,000 patent applications were made in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2014. If you look at the green line, there were about 4,000 patent applications by Canadians in Canada, so about three-quarters of the applicants will go to the U.S. first, and that's a business decision. Likewise, if you look at the red and purple lines, that represents university filings, and it's the same proportion. About three-quarters of universities will file in the States.
We conducted what is called IT analytics. This allows us to dig deeper into the data that's provided in the patent applications, and here you see the spread of technology that Canadian universities are patenting worldwide. You can see this landscape of peaks and valleys. The snow-capped peaks represent the specialty areas in which Canadian universities are filing for patents. Two to highlight are alkyl and optical light beams, for example, and I'll get back to that. That's the general landscape, if you will, of technology that Canadian universities are patenting.
Now we'll look at just one university, so we can go deeper. Here, looking at McGill, for example, in the last 15 years they filed for 273 patents in Canada. Worldwide they filed for 758. When we look at the patent applications, we can unbundle where the collaborations are happening, and I understand that is an initiative this committee is interested in looking at—where the collaboration is happening. In 52% of these worldwide patent applications that McGill pursued over the last 15 years, over half of them had collaborations with other universities and companies. We did the same thing for UBC, but let's skip forward.
If you dig even deeper into the patent data, you can identify where the collaboration is happening. Here at the University of Ottawa this is a collaboration map looking at optical transmission and communication systems, and you can see how these patents are coming forward as collaborative applications with the University of Ottawa and companies such as X-Ray Optical Systems or Spectalis Corp., as well as Harvard and Waterloo universities. Once you start digging deeper and deeper into the data, you can see where the collaboration is happening.
Now let me step back. At CIPO our mandate is to support innovation and help pull through the ideas once they come to our office. We tried to better understand some of the challenges that technology transfer offices and universities were facing in applying for IP, and they identified five key challenges. There is a fifth one that is not on this slide, but I'll start with that: cost. Clearly technology transfer offices have to make business decisions as to what they pursue to patent. Our office provides a 50% discount to university applicants. It's our contribution to help reduce costs for the university applicant.
A second issue that came up was the issue around awareness and education. We heard throughout, from technology transfer offices and the community around universities, that there's a need for awareness of how to effectively use IP. With that, CIPO is launching very extensive work on developing educational programs and material for IP strategy. We have something called IP case studies. We work with students in universities to help them understand IP, as they're part of the spin-off, if you will, for university discovery.
A third element that came up in terms of a barrier or a challenge that universities face, is, as I mentioned earlier, that three-quarters will file outside of Canada. There was the issue of harmonization internationally. CIPO is working very hard to implement some international IP treaties, and we're targeting 2019 for them to come into force. This will help to ensure that there's a harmonized system, and it will help facilitate IP filing in Canada and abroad.
A fourth element was trying to understand the breadth of technology and what's coming forward. What we're doing, and I demonstrated earlier through IP analytics, is trying to show where the technologies are coming up. That helps identify the collaboration. This type of information can help inform professors, technology transfers, where the collaboration can happen.
The final element was really directed at the office itself. Our databases are lacking, and we are working hard to modernize them. We have done quite a bit over the last few months to bring more information forward to users.
To sum up, you've seen some of the trends. We've done a deep dive into the technology areas. We are taking action at CIPO, for those coming to our door, to help facilitate their applications going forward.
I'll wrap up with that.