Industry committee  I think it's a red herring in terms of being a real problem. A lot of it really depends on the nature of the technology. In the IT world, it should flow out with the individual--that's the way that place works. That's a good example of what Waterloo has done. If you get into the biotech and life sciences, you'd better have pretty strong patent protection.

Industry committee  It's certainly something we are doing now. We work quite collaboratively amongst ourselves, so when one institution is working on a project the other one gets behind it. An example is SFU and Michael from the angel network, which UBC takes good advantage of. To speak directly to your point, a new initiative that has come out of the B.C. universities and hospitals is the Centre for Drug Research and Development.

Industry committee  The use of indirect costs for the affiliates programs is already happening to a certain extent, but the amount of reimbursement under the indirect costs program is 25% when the real costs are 50%. So that money is really spent in multiple directions, and there's not a lot of it allocated towards any specific use because the draws on it are so large.

Industry committee  These things happen over a period of time. I'll give you another example, in this case technology that's gone into Westport Innovations, allowing diesel engines to run on natural gas. It sounds like a wonderful idea. It came into our office in 1987. We thought that we would just patent it and turn around and license it to Detroit Diesel Corporation and Cummins, the large manufacturers.

Industry committee  Definitely there is a large proportion that fail. When we look at what's happening in the U.S., particularly in some industries like drug development, there is more effort to develop the technologies further in the institutions, so that when they come out, they are more industry-ready and have been “de-risked”.

Industry committee  Ultimately we'll end up licensing about 22% of the innovations that we see. We get 180 of them a year on average. We'll get considerable revenue out of only about 5% to 10% of that 22%. So on a technology push model, it's not something that routinely generates large amounts of money in return.