Industry Committee on June 6th, 2017

[Stephen Susalka]

There have been approaches where a one-size-fits-all agreement has been tested. That is definitely not the major way [Technical difficulty—Editor] Many specifics on the institution, the company, or the intellectual property necessitate tailoring.

That being said, in the example you provided where you have three different institutions licensing intellectual property to a company, what is happening more and more is that those institutions will work together and all be part of the same licence agreement to that company. Exactly where the intellectual property came from is not important to the company; it just matters that the company gets the intellectual property. That gets back to this correspondence between technology transfer offices from different institutions. It makes it easy to pick up the phone, call those other two institutions, and say, “Here's the agreement we need to put in place. Let's get this done in one fell swoop.”

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

You have 3,200 members, of which 200 are Canadian. I imagine that out of 3,200 there are a few others who are international, but the majority are American. Is that correct?

[Stephen Susalka]

That's exactly right. The majority are in the United States, although we do have representatives from 57 different countries.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

What are we statistically like? If I understood AUTM's history, at one time you were more prevalent in Canada. Then you withdrew or kind of faded, and then you came back. Is that correct?

[Stephen Susalka]

Yes, I believe that was due to there being a Canadian organization at one time, ACCT Canada. When that went away, Canadian tech transfer professionals were looking for resources, and AUTM came back to Ottawa.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Okay.

Maybe, Mr. Porter, you could expand on those two issues. We're looking at being easy to do business with through contracting and because the person being spoken to is highly knowledgeable.

[Kenneth Porter]

Yes. First, on the knowledge, there's the Lambert agreement in the U.K. I don't know if you're aware of that.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I'm not.

[Kenneth Porter]

They have a really nice website and a suite of standard agreements that they've designed to fit particular situations. You can take a look at that.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Is it “Lambert”?

[Kenneth Porter]

Yes. At our Montreal meeting, we're going to have a panel on that. If you would like to join us for the panel, we will be discussing the Lambert agreements and standardization of contracts.

With respect to education, yes, ACCT Canada was disbanded in 2013. For a year or two, Canadian professionals had no go-to organization for organizing ourselves. We decided to come together and organize ourselves under AUTM, using the infrastructure of AUTM. That's been successful, and we continue to build—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

That's fairly recent, though.

[Kenneth Porter]

Yes, starting in 2014.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Is that adding value in terms of the sharing of best practices?

[Kenneth Porter]

Absolutely, and I wanted to illustrate that. The Montreal meeting is our second meeting since we've reorganized. Last year, we had a meeting in Toronto. The first day of the meeting was a start-up course in sharing best practices among the institutions. We had room for 72 people, and the 72 slots were sold out before the early bird special expired. We got a second room and we piped in video for 40 more people.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

There's a demand for our tech transfer officers, who need to know more. They need to know about these best practices.

Something fell apart, you reconstituted yourself, and you're trying to learn from AUTM, where they obviously have this tremendous wealth of knowledge.

[Kenneth Porter]

Exactly. Forty people signed up just to participate in another room by video.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Just to pull in that....

[Kenneth Porter]

Yes.

In the west, another Western Economic Diversification program we had was WestLink. It was an education program. It's been gone for five years or so, but we at Innovate Calgary—we haven't announced this—are very interested in reconstituting that in maybe a week-long course where folks across Canada can come—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I'm running out of time, but very quickly, you mentioned that one of the problems when the original funding dried up in 2009 was not just that we lost people, but that we lost the best people. What is the impact of that?

[Kenneth Porter]

It takes about three years to get a person who is not well versed in IP or technology transfer to where they're minimally useful. That three-year life is going to apply to any new inexperienced hire.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Okay.

Mr. Hinton, I'll give you the last word.

[James Hinton]

Yes, I think supporting the tech transfer offices is very important.

We have to be careful to realize that we can transfer the technology very well, but we have to make sure we are transferring it to Canadian companies that are going to be able to benefit and exploit this technology themselves. If we facilitate better technology transfer and it ends up going somewhere else, and we're not able to reap the economic benefits, then the purpose is lost. We need to make sure that the end goal is to benefit Canadian companies—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

That's great. I just want to touch on that one point, because it's about what you measure. If I'm a university and I measure just my royalties, I don't measure my royalties from Canadian companies or my royalties from a Chinese company. In one way I have $70 of royalties that are only Canadian, and the other way I have $100 of royalties, but those royalties are all Chinese. You'd rather see $70 of Canadian royalties than $100 of Chinese royalties. Would that be fair to say?

[James Hinton]

Well, I'd like to have it both ways—