To the first question, there was an organization that existed from the 1930s until 1992 in Canada, called Canadian Patent Development Limited. There's one paper on it, if you want to see a coordinated approach on what happened to it. It was axed in the early 1990s.
I'll give you two stats. Apple and Google spend more on patents than they do on R and D. We're being woefully outplayed if we think that we can have a couple of tech transfer officers here and there and compete at this level. IBM got more patents last year than the entire country of Canada. We're being woefully outplayed. We're not capturing the IP. We have great technology, but we're just giving it away. Those are my stats.
What can we do about it? IP education is a start. I work at Communitech. I'm there every week, and I give out pro bono IP law clinic work. If a student from UW wants to talk about IP, I'm happy to give away my time. Getting the profession out and being more active at the hands-on ground level, professing, giving away this IP knowledge, and getting it in there, that's the base level.
Then, internationally, we need mechanisms that are going to enable Canadian companies to compete globally. This includes litigation support. If Canadian companies get into international IP litigation and they're being dragged down to east Texas to defend against a non-practising entity or patent troll, they need to have the sophistication, which is not available in Canada, to manage and navigate these systems. Defensively, we have great technology. Use this technology. Use the IP that comes from it to be defensive in a licensing way, if you're sued, in a countersuit.