Thank you. Let me just start again.
It specifically was around the role the federal government can play in enabling. Perhaps it was number three, which is the review of the IP ownership.
Maybe I'll respond by saying that we've listened to past witnesses, Dr. Karim from UW and Dr. Jeff Taylor from Colleges and Institutes. They commented on the differences between universities and colleges.
Colleges are closer to industry, since their projects tend to be faster and the IP goes to the company, whereas universities are more curiosity-driven. They tend to focus on groundbreaking deep tech or social innovation, on things that maybe companies won't take. They focus on highly qualified personnel and spinoffs. The problem we have, of course, is that these are competing missions. The discovery of new ideas and the dissemination to students is the mission of a university. One is creation and the other is commercialization. One is invention and one is actual innovation.
On the recommendation, if you look at the wide variety of IP rights or commercialization at the universities, on one side of the country we have, for example, UBC, which is entirely institutionally owned, and on the other side, we have the University of Waterloo, which is entirely creator-owned. Somewhere in the middle we have perhaps Toronto, for example, which is jointly owned.
In the economies that are performing best—and they've been cited here in Fraunhofer or perhaps even in the Israeli discussion—you see a centralization and a common standardization of that IP policy. Recommendation number three is to review those rights ownership policies, the technology transfer models and the ownership of those rights and how they get transferred into the economy. Again, we do really well at that side, but we fail at the firm level to transfer those ideas and the HQP, the highly qualified personnel, into the economy.
Let me just say that certainly it needs strong federal coordination, and I think consistent provincial implementation will clarify the best models for research and industrial partners. Again, I would say that tri-council grants must ensure that IP remains in Canada for the benefit of Canadians.