First of all, I'm not aware of a situation where Waterloo's IP policy has really materially contributed to Waterloo's success. I'm not aware of a company that's been a successful spin-off from Waterloo of any scale in the last 20 years that's professor-based research. Of course, you have tremendous students who begin to do this. The returns from Waterloo's commercialization have been minuscule—between $50 and $500,000 a year gross, with six and a half FTEs and hundreds of millions of dollars in research. I would be interested in the case where Waterloo's IP policy has contributed to the Waterloo region's success. I'm not aware of any in the last couple of decades.
IP collectives are very common around the world. There's a pilot at ISED right now, headquartered in the Waterloo region, for clean tech and data-driven technologies. Canada was built on collectives, whether it was credit unions for financing communities, mutual companies for insurance, grain co-ops, equipment co-ops or butteries. You can go on and on. Canada was built through coordinated strategies. It's simply that playbook.
They're very common around the world. Japan has multiple ones, as well as France, South Korea, Germany and Singapore. They're an organized structure that retains it and gives it stewardship rather than fragmenting it.
As a small example, the Fraunhofer Institutes—the 72 research institutes in Germany with 29,000 researchers—have one centralized agency. Ontario, where I chaired a panel on this, has between two and three dozen, depending on how you define, and is a fraction of the size of the Fraunhofer. It's two orders of magnitude of fragmentation of structural organization.
That's why I say it's really about the organization. It's an organization structural principle, to summarize it. There are tons of examples around the world.
Ontario started IP Ontario as a recommendation of our panel. Ottawa has a pilot. Scale it and it's pennies. It just helps those that quite frankly need the help. It's a market failure and a capacity failure. This is small dollars, if not zero dollars.
This is not a criticism of the universities. You've asked them to do a job that is not their normal job or skill. Like you don't want me to be your chef because I'm not skilled at it, but I have other skills.