Sure. Thank you.
We are a nation of small and medium-sized companies that generally underutilize intangible assets like intellectual property. We know that the proper use of intellectual property by a company is directly linked to or has a high impact on productivity rates, the potential to compete and the potential to export. I think we should be much more careful about how we manage intellectual property when there are partnerships with public research.
I have a bit of a distinction. I don't think it's enough to say that a company is given IP rights in a project and that we cede all intellectual property without knowing whether or not they know how to manage it. If we give it to a start-up, what happens if that start-up gets acquired very early in its existence by a company in another region? That intellectual property is gone and we don't track it. What happens if the start-up does not survive, like the majority of start-ups? What happens to the intellectual property we've invested in?
Finally, if we give exclusive intellectual property rights to one organization, we lose the potential to share it with multiple other SMEs that could have competed and used it in more non-competitive areas than the one that was initially collaborating with the public research entities.
I think we need to be more sophisticated in the way we negotiate and handle intellectual property, in general. It's not enough to say that a company has a right to exploit IP, because often it does not get exploited and is left on the shelf. Others cannot then exploit it, because it wasn't well packaged.