My apologies. I have been booted off of the meeting a couple of times. Hopefully you can hear me okay and the audio is back.
I was saying that a large portion of the IP that's developed in Canada ended up being owned by international companies, notably in fields like AI. We fund the effort, but our economy and society often don't reap the greatest benefits.
Quebec invested heavily in a strategy for R and D investments and innovations through SQRI2 strategy. These are research and innovation investments whereby hundreds of millions are being strategically invested to support proactive growth and maximize impact from our strong research foundations. Quebec created the position of a chief innovation officer to work in tandem with the existing chief scientific officer and created the Conseil de l'innovation du Québec to generate tools like Baromètre de l’innovation du Québec to actively track key indicators in order to inform decision-making.
In 2021, the Quebec government consolidated what were historically fragmented technology officers throughout universities in order to consolidate efforts. This is Axelys. Yes, Ontario developed their agency, but Quebec has a similar, though slightly different, approach in Axelys.
We were mandated to identify high-potential inventions regardless of where they came from across the province—since of course, innovation is everywhere—support them with appropriate IP tools and mature them to a point of being de-risked towards a transfer to an entity that can deploy them. Of course, that is where invention becomes innovation: It's only once that invention is deployed.
This has allowed us to consolidate expertise and pool resources, mainly legal and financial, to support IP stemming from all publicly funded research institutions across the province, avoiding many of the redundancies that led to a lesser capacity of support. Of course, that maximizes impact across the province and, I dare say, in the entire country.
Our solution, which is found in the SQRI2, had three major objectives.
One was to raise the awareness and socialize the importance of IP and its tools. Of course, this is to catalyze or further a culture shift that's happening already across the ecosystem.
Second, we wanted to create a team of experts on the ground to accompany each role across the spectrum of key players to support their specific IP strategy across research and industrial fields.
Third was to bring specific financial resources to generate more and better-quality IP, and then find appropriate parties and transfer it to them.
Our key recommendations to this committee are these: First, bring awareness and education on the importance of IP. Second, create specific tools to better utilize it and align messages and interests across research entities to provide proper incentives. Third, provide tools to accompany specific initiatives and work with provincial governments that are most advanced and organizations that are most advanced here.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel, as was also said by Mr. Balsillie. We should be supporting, strengthening and aligning efforts here. The more resources, tools and alignment of these efforts that can be provided while leveraging regional strengths across the country—which is obviously a cornerstone of a strong innovation ecosystem—the more Canada can turn the innovation paradox into the innovation powerhouse. It has so many of the key ingredients required to achieve it.
I apologize for being 23 seconds over, but it was the time it took me to get off and back on to this call.