Thank you very much for the invitation to speak with you today about SMEs.
My name is Konstantinos Georgaras. I am the interim chief executive officer of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, a special operating agency of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.
I understand that the committee is particularly interested in looking at trademark activities in Canada. I would be pleased to speak to that.
I'm also joined by the director general for the trademark and industrial designs branch, Mesmin Pierre, as well as Iyana Goyette, the policy director.
I would like to start by providing a brief overview of the clients and Canadians we serve, followed by the specific trends in trademarks and what we have done to improve services and respond to surging demand.
Overall, we receive over 112,000 applications for IP annually. Those are for patents, trademarks and industrial designs. In 2020, we received over 34,000 patent applications, almost 70,000 trademark applications and over 7,000 industrial design applications. That's the annual inflow.
Because IP lasts for several years—it's up to 20 years for patents, and trademarks are renewable indefinitely—there are over 800,000 IP rights in force in Canada. The impact is vast, and we are honoured to serve these companies and individuals.
For patents, this represents innovators who are bringing science, technology and research and development to the market to serve Canadians. For trademarks, this represents companies working to establish their brand, goodwill, product recognition and consumer confidence. IP rights provide the tools to help these creative entities get to the market with confidence. IP rights also help them monetize, collateralize, protect, trade and license their ideas.
I would like to note that this is very much an international space. Innovation is global and IP, likewise, is global. With that, over 70% of all of our IP applications come from outside of Canada, mostly from the U.S., Germany, China, the U.K. and France. Likewise, many Canadians file for IP outside of Canada, in the U.S., China, Europe and Mexico.
To better understand the our clients' challenges and opportunities, we had the opportunity to participate with Statistics Canada on the IP awareness and use survey that was released just last year. That survey interviewed 16,000 companies. I would like to highlight a couple of positive outcomes, as well as some challenges.
We found that 58% of companies were familiar with IP, and that 18% held at least one form of IP....
I'm sorry. Do we have a technology issue?