A company's intellectual property strategy rests on a number of things. It is shaped in part by their sector and their location, as well as their market.
For many companies, a primary consideration is that they want protections in the places in which they sell. They also want the recognition of their technology from an office of considerable repute that will potentially allow people to know that they have an idea, they have protected an idea, and that they have someone who has taken a credible look at it. That's not to disparage any of the IP offices around the world.
That's why many people file in the first instance in places like the United States and the European Union. They are large markets with very large patent offices for that capacity.
That said, Canada increasingly plays an important role not only as a country of second filing, but also as a market. That is why my colleague noted that the majority of applications coming into the Canadian intellectual property system are coming from abroad. It's because they're interested in the Canadian market.
It's also why we need to look very carefully when we make judgments about how well Canadian firms are doing because many of them are actually interested in those markets abroad and are potentially using other offices as the place in which they're filing.
Then it's about which rights you file for. For some companies, patents are going to be the be-all and end-all. It's the most important thing they can do. For others, they're relying on things like trade secrets, their copyright, their trademark or an industrial design.
All of those are specific to the business, which speaks to why IP advice and IP strategies are so critical for leading small and medium-size enterprises to think through thoughtfully. Those strategic choices about which markets, which rights and in what order are all very important, particularly when a company's at its early growth stage where it's not necessarily ripe with capital.