Well, thank you very much. That's a great question. I'm often very concerned with and focused on IP, and not necessarily for the same reasons you just mentioned. Within the university, I think we have a tendency to see intellectual property as one of the primary ways that we create value—through the production of ideas that are then patented or somehow have some type of IP protection, which then gives us the capacity to exchange those or sell them out to industry. What I've actually been seeing during this COVID period is people choosing the alternative path—choosing not to patent, choosing not to copyright even their inventions. You saw this, in this committee, with Dr. McDonald talking about the lack of patenting of the ventilator.
The issue here is not so much that people may not have the freedom to operate or that they may be restricted by patent, but that they may be restricted by their own institutions, which may not understand how to value the results they have created unless there is somehow intellectual property involved. It's quite interesting that IP is often valued in the same way that, say, a published article might be valued in the university. That's a great way for people to kind of pad out their CV. What do you do if what you're creating results in neither one of those two things but has real impact in the world? How do you navigate that? I think that's actually a bigger restriction.
In a series of interviews I've done with people who've been participating with my own little group, the Toronto emergency device accelerator, this has been highlighted as a real issue for them, that they've taken time out of their normal work, their normal research, to try to have a real impact, and now they're looking at, “Well, what has this really done to my career?” I find it very sad that this is the case.