Industry committee  Yes, of course, as my colleague was telling me, IRAP advisors also travel a lot within their territory to visit all manner of companies, wherever they are, in order to provide advice, as well as financial contributions if necessary.

Industry committee  Yes, I believe I can say that. Regarding lapsed money, as you know, when an IRAP contribution is accepted, we very much depend on the company to be able to deliver and to invoice NRC, because these are not payments that we make in advance. We pay when companies invoice us. We put a lot of effort in following all of those projects to make sure that a contribution will indeed be delivered to those companies.

Industry committee  I will ask Mrs. Pat Mortimer, who is managing this program, to provide you with an accurate answer to this particular point.

Industry committee  Commercialization in Canada, as we all know, is a topic that is a bit difficult. Through IRAP we are providing not only a financial contribution, but we provide a lot of advice and expertise to SMEs. As a matter of fact, more than 10,000 companies receive IRAP support in one way or another.

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As I mentioned earlier in my presentation, NRC received an additional $200 million through the IRAP program to continue to support the SMEs of this country. At this point in time, most of this money is already committed. Again, we will receive another $100 million in the next fiscal year.

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, as a productive and internationally respected research and development organization, the National Research Council, or NRC, continues to bring advanced knowledge and new technologies to Canadian industries, helping them to compete more effectively on the world stage.

Public Accounts committee  That is why, as I mentioned before, every year we have a look at our patent portfolio and we decide to drop some patents because we judge that the cost of maintaining it compared to the cost of licensing it is not in our favour.

Public Accounts committee  A patent, broadly speaking, is expensive to manage. A patent could cost about $150,000, not per year but over the lifetime of the patent. It could be $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000. It depends on where you have the patent, in which countries, and in how many countries you maintain a patent.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, you have to pay fees and translate them.

Public Accounts committee  Briefly, I think Paul is making reference to IRAP. There are two components to that program. One basically addresses the issue that Paul mentioned, providing capacity to bring young scientists into companies. It's called the youth employment program, whereby we fund companies to hire new graduates.

Public Accounts committee  It's the industrial research assistance program.

Public Accounts committee  I will follow on what Paul just mentioned. From our point of view and in terms of our activities at NRC, if you want to increase innovation, I would say we need to have a constant dialogue with industry in order to know the needs of the industry and how R and D can support those needs and bring new technologies into the marketplace.

Public Accounts committee  We certainly have a system. Let me first try to discriminate a bit about IP arising from procurement and the notion that industry will own that in some circumstances. I think we have to realize that owning an IP and making a lot of money out of that IP are two very different things.

Public Accounts committee  From time to time...what we observe is that we conclude about 100 licence agreements per year. We do not have the data for this current year, when Canada is supposed to be in a recession, so that could be a reflection if we observe a significant shift down in the licensing agreements that we have.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. First of all, let me say that NRC has a good understanding of the patents that we own. Currently we own about 850 patents in our portfolio. We now have about 1,300 patent applications, because there is a delay between the patent application and the granting of the patent by a patenting agency.