Absolutely.
At UBC, inventors' inventions are provided to the university, because we are institution-owned and it is an institution policy that we take towards IP. When they are disclosed, an analysis is done to determine what should be patented. Our patent budget is very small. We stretch it in multiple ways to be able to file those over 300 patents that we filed last year. If we don't protect that intellectual property at its inception, then over time we lose the ability as a country to even think about commercializing that technology.
The more we can file provisional patents and do work on patent families to get those fundamental patents in place, the more our researchers and Canadians have an ability to think about how we can commercialize that further.