I think we have success stories, but I think there are lessons to be learned from other countries as well.
As an example, I'm just back from Israel where I teach a course between my University of Ottawa and the University of Haifa. Its focus is on global technology policy. One of the focal points was talking a lot about cyber and cybersecurity there. As you probably know, Israel has been an incubator for some of the leading technologies and some of the leading companies.
One of the things that was most interesting about it was that we met with a number of councils and a number of companies focused on this. Much of the technology and the cutting-edge IP comes out of the military, unsurprisingly, and the people who are doing this are kids who are coming out of the military. There is a particular unit focused on some of these cyber issues and they quickly move from the military into developing some of these companies that are now world leaders, in many instances.
The question came up, “Well, what does the military do about the intellectual property?” The answer was nothing. What it wants to do is to ensure that this gets out. They actually believe that the development of companies in the private sector and better technologies will also help from a security perspective, not just those companies, but it will help society more broadly. There is an interest in ensuring that happens.
My point here is that, in some ways, the military functions much like our educational institutions, or like universities and colleges ought to function. The focus is not on how we hoard our IP or commercialize our IP. It is rather on how we do our best to transfer that knowledge, so that there are broader benefits. That can come from a number of different ways. If our primary metric is patents, licences, or revenue, coming back to these institutions, then we're measuring the wrong thing.