Good morning, I'm Marie Gagné, CEO of Synchronex, a network of college centres for technology transfer and innovative social practices.
A CCTT is a centre for innovation and applied research. We have 59 of them in Quebec, 49 devoted to technology and 10 for social innovation. Each centre specializes in a field ranging from aerospace and integration of people with disabilities to agriculture and artificial intelligence. Each centre has its own area of expertise. They bring together a total of 2,400 experts across Quebec. They are the equivalent of technology access centres or polytechnics in the rest of Canada. Each year, our experts work with 6,000 businesses on 11,000 innovation projects. We're talking about intellectual property commercialization support here today.
Commercializing an invention means making it an innovation and integrating it into the market. Commercializing an invention means using it. The committee's study could be called “Support for the Use of Intellectual Property”. Because over 50% of Canada's GDP is linked to the activity of small and medium-sized enterprises, we need to develop a model that meets the needs of SMEs. They need a model that is both simple, to help them overcome their reluctance to innovate, and fast, to quickly show them the benefits of innovation. SMEs also need a low-cost system to protect profit margins, which took a hit during the pandemic and are currently being hampered by inflationary pressures.
There's no doubt that traditional patent management is neither simple, quick, nor inexpensive. We would argue that intellectual property needs to be put to work and licenced. In 99% of cases, when we work with businesses, we give them usage rights in their field of activity. Let me give you an example. If we develop a new alloy for a dental business, we assign that business the rights to use that alloy for dental purposes. We can then continue to work on that alloy and adapt it it for a battery or aerospace business, for example. We apply flexible, simple, effective intellectual property management.
We're certainly not into all or nothing. We're about incremental innovation. When we have an all or nothing, we work together with universities and then it's a more formal type of intellectual property based on a patent, and the university's development office works on it. In Quebec, this is done in cooperation with Axelys, an agency that deals with intellectual property.
So my recommendation to the committee is pretty straightforward and has to do with funding. If we want our businesses to be able to use intellectual property, and therefore commercialize it, we need to support even more funding for applied research, and therefore the technology access centres and polytechnics. They have expertise in innovation at the grassroots level, which enables the use of intellectual property.
In the most recent budget, we received over $100 million in additional funding for the college and community innovation program, which is administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Those funds will be available for three years. Three years is not enough time to develop long-term strategies, nor is it enough time to attract, hire and retain top talent. So we need sustained recurring funding, and the $170 million requested was a minimum amount.
We need to support innovation in our SMEs so that intellectual property gets used. We also need to more adequately support networking, bridging between the applied research done in colleges and the university community. We need to shorten the time between idea, invention and innovation, that moment when a new technology hits the market and gets used. To do that, we need to more adequately support the relationship between universities and applied research organizations in the development of projects, upstream of business involvement, to reduce the risk to business. We need to make sure that what we offer to businesses is easy to integrate and promotes wealth creation for Canada.
I'm ready to answer your questions.