OTTAWA — It has impressive research bench strength. It has billions of federal dollars for the taking. It's kind of a nice place to live.
He made the pitch, saying Canada has many of the ingredients it needs: among other things, clean energy, a good quality of life for workers and government programs to encourage the sector.More than that, Canadians have "fallen far behind," argued Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents the tech sector.
Another 18 per cent of the 244 patents he tracked — 198 from Vector and 46 from Mila — are now owned by North American academic institutions.Of the foreign-owned patents, the largest number, 65, went to Uber, while 35 landed with the Walt Disney Company. Nvidia, which recently displaced Microsoft as the world's most valuable company, got 34.
"Those private-sector organizations own the rights to the IP that is generated by those researchers," she said, but only when they're on the clock for those companies. When it comes to sponsorship agreements at Toronto's Vector, any IP created at the institute "belongs to Vector," a spokesperson said, adding it is not the primary employer for most of its researchers.
"The government already had a top-down strategy that it wanted to implement … and didn't really care what CEOs and leaders of domestic firms were actually needing in order to be successful," he said. A spokesperson for Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said more details would be provided in the coming weeks.