Industry committee  We want to maintain a high-quality patent system and not decrease the requirements we have in Canada. There is a lot of international pressure for Canada to make it easier to get patents. We need to resist it. The higher the quality of patents and the higher the standards require

Industry committee  I think if we were perfect we wouldn't be working anywhere. Actually, there's a lot of misinformation about the Bayh-Dole Act. It only applies to a percentage of U.S. rules. It's only federally funded research that is subject to it. As to anything that comes from the state or f

Industry committee  So far, because of the way our litigation system works, there's not as large an incentive, as there is in the United States, to come here. The fact that the U.S. has jury trials is really the most anti-foreign IP rule the U.S. has, because juries will naturally side with their ow

Industry committee  I'll leave it to ISED to determine that. It doesn't have to be a physical structure. I'm imagining the supercluster as infrastructure, including broadband. It includes the services to collect the information; it connects with a patent pool of some sort, but I don't think it's phy

Industry committee  In my specific remarks, I was actually talking about charities. I was thinking about things like the Michael J. Fox Foundation, or Wellcome Trust, or the equivalent—patient foundations here that have pots of money. They invest in research, but they don't get involved with the inn

Industry committee  I listened to the interpretation, and I think I understand your question. It's quite easy, actually. There are patent registers, and companies search those databases. They are in contact with researchers, so they can see what exists in Canada. We are talking about big companies

Industry committee  One of the underlying things of a patent pool is as people like Jim Hinton have said. He spoke at the committee two days ago and has done extensive research on what patents exist in Canada and who holds them. Part of the supercluster idea could be that you fund the development of

Industry committee  The most realistic patent pool is not one owned by the government. That has been done in South Korea and France. It should be industry-led, with government funding and co-funding. I work with Power Corporation here. They're interested in doing some things in this area, whereby f

Industry committee  I actually do empirical work and I use a whole bunch of different indices to do this. The one Scott refers to is an industry-based one, which is quite opaque in its methodology. It doesn't meet academic standards, but it doesn't mean it's useless. It's based on what industry, esp

Industry committee  That's the million dollar question. If I had the answer, I'd win the Nobel prize. It's the environment. We know it's the entire ecosystem. It's not the IP system itself. I think we've touched on a number of these things. Some of it is capital. We don't have enough people with exp

Industry committee  We have to separate out these two things: research activity is vastly different from innovation activity. You do research because it generates knowledge, it generates people, it generates excitement and places that are attractive. There is not an innovative place in the world tha

Industry committee  I don't think so, because most of them actually go to grants during the summer. The university pays a full year's salary in nine months. You have to remember that U.S. researchers are paid vastly more than we are, so they basically get in nine months what we would get in a year,

Industry committee  Certainly. Innovation is done by industry; research is done by universities. If you don't have research, you don't get innovation, but if you don't have companies doing things, you don't get things going. You need them to work together. There are lots of forms of partnerships. Yo

Industry committee  Let me just focus on one in particular, and that is the use of charities. Our rules around charitable investments are pretty strict. What we're looking at is creating models where charities will fund research to provide open data, but if something comes out of that, a commercial

Industry committee  It would be sharing of data, I think, from a research point of view in tech transfer. It would be making data of high quality available easily in a format people can use, and measuring the results. In terms of helping our businesses, I would say invest in providing SMEs with str