Hi, this is my first time here, so I brought my five copies.
I'm coming at this from a different angle. I'm coming from industry. Our consortium exists probably because companies like Nortel don't exist any more, which is quite unfortunate. I'm here on behalf of large industry members. Unfortunately, most of them are multinationals based outside of Canada, although we do have a lot of service providers, the large Canadian service providers as well.
We're a centre of excellence. We're funded by the NCE and we focus on ICT/telecom, which I would argue is the foundation of the next digital economy. You can't name any industry that is not going to have a technology component to it.
Our model is very simple from an intellectual property view. We deal a lot with small and medium enterprise. That is where the innovation comes from. I used to work for very large companies like Cisco Systems. I ran their R and D here in Ottawa for many years. I also worked for Bell Canada, and so on. When you're at these large companies, you think that you're innovating, and you are, but the bright ideas are coming from the smaller companies. In my opinion those are the ones that need their intellectual properties protected.
When they come to the table, in our model we have large multinationals that put out problem statements: we would like investment in these areas. Small companies submit a proposal that may or may not match what these companies are looking for. We bring in students and professors from universities to do a proof of concept and a commercialization exercise, and in that way we believe that this is the proper engine or, in the ICT space, this is the proper vehicle for commercialization. At least we've had some very good success.
We are going to be launching our program across Ontario, linking all of the innovation centres together. You'll see that in my slides whenever you can see them. Then we also plan to link the innovation centres across the country, as well as the superclusters and the centre of excellence. That's our long-term view and, effectively, any of the major vertical spaces—be they oil and gas, mining, energy, health care, you name it—will have an ICT component and will ride over this infrastructure.
Now, it does need to be open and to be standard spaced. That's the only solution that would make sense. From an intellectual property perspective, our model is very simple. The IP actually stays with the SME. This is agreed to. The large multinationals have very big law firms and we need to make sure that the small companies who can't afford it are protected. That is right in our mandate. It's in our proposals, so unless the SME agrees to partner, licence, or share, it stays with them. If we create something together while we're doing this proof of concept or commercialization, then we would have a discussion about where that intellectual property would lie. Right now, it's assumed that it would be joint, with equal representation from the various members.
In terms of technology transfer, we have a very interesting competition in the sense that we have industry members who compete with each another, but when they come to CENGN for the benefit of Canada, they co-operate. There are times when material cannot flow company to company, so we need to make sure that is absolutely secure. Technology transfer will happen once all the appropriate agreements had been signed, and so on.
That is our model. I know it's a very simplistic view. I'm certainly not a lawyer, but from my industry perspective, I believe innovation comes from industry. It comes from the small companies and that is where the IP needs to stay.
Thank you.