Let's go right back to the notion of disclosures. I was the same: when I started out at Western back in 2002, I said we had to get our disclosure rate up. The fact is, you can do that. You can walk around, talk to everybody, get them to disclose, and put everything on the table. The problem is, they're going to disclose everything and anything they think might go somewhere.
Then the tech transfer folks have to decide what's worthy of protecting and what's not. There's a tendency to want to protect, as opposed to not to protect. Most universities carry inventories or stocks of patents that are probably too high. It's worse because you have to pay to maintain these patents.
When I first became VP of research at Western, we were spending on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to maintain patents that were going nowhere. That was part of our ongoing cost. How to get them out is one issue, and selecting the things that will move forward is another.