Introduction
Throughout this course you have learned about what IP is, how it is acquired and the basic building blocks of IP strategy.
We hope that you now appreciate that ownership of IP, third-party IP and freedom to operate must be considered from the very start in developing an IP strategy.
This is important in both a purely commercial construct as well as in the context of publicly funded research and innovation.
In the Canadian context, much of the innovation that we see around us has its origins in publicly funded research which occurs in the following settings:
- Universities
- Colleges
- Dedicated Research Institutes.
We will generally refer to these settings in this module as research institutions and will refer to the IP coming out of these settings as “Institutional IP”.
It should be noted that while Institutional IP encompasses all of the various forms of IP, the truth is that currently a lot of IP commercialization efforts relate to patented or patentable inventions, and it is in this particular area that most of the complexity and concerns arise.
As a result, we will be specific in our terminology so that we will refer specifically to patents most of the time and we will use the term IP when what we are saying is capable of application beyond patents.