Intellectual property issues discussed at summit

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This article was published 27/02/2025 (393 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If it wasn’t enough that the U.S. wants to impose punishing tariffs on Canadian imports, Canadian digital technology companies run the risk of having their intellectual property poached by Silicon Valley giants.

It’s no secret that larger companies take calculated risks on infringing on smaller companies’ innovation if they think they do not have the resources to defend their innovation.

Many of the players interested in intellectual property (IP) in Manitoba were at the RBC Convention Centre on Wednesday for the North Forge IP Summit to hear about the importance of having a strategy in place to defend their proprietary intellectual property.

For the past three years, North Forge Technology Exchange has been the Manitoba administrator for the federal government’s ElevateIP program, which had a $90 million budget starting in 2022-23 to provide assistance to Canadian startups to better manage and protect and ultimately monetize their IP.

Companies can receive up to $100,000 or 70 per cent of the costs of their IP strategy (with even more support for Indigenous or women-owned businesses).

Nermin Sa’d, director of programming and global initiatives at North Forge, said there has been a groundswell of interest in Manitoba, a community that had lagged in relative investments in IP protection.

“We could use three times the budget we had,” said Sa’d, a highly regarded entrepreneur in her own right, with her own patents. Originally from Jordan — she’s lived in Manitoba for five years — Sa’d was named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes Middle East last decade.

North Forge has an annual budget of $1 million for the ElevateIP program and after taking a year to set the program up has seen demand far outstrip its budget.

“The second year we ran out of money and the new year applications starts April 1 and we already have a waiting list,” said North Forge CEO Joelle Foster.

She noted Canada holds its own with countries like the United Kingdom and Australia when it comes to patent filings in fields like bioscience, pharmaceuticals and civil engineering, but is clearly lagging behind the U.S., China and South Korea when it comes to AI, semiconductors and computer technologies.

“The global economy is shifting to digital, AI and tech-driven industries,” Foster said. “We must accelerate our patent activity in these fields to remain competitive.”

With the average cost of establishing an IP strategy — which may or may not include filing patent applications — at about $25,000, it’s not hard to imagine how small companies would try to delay that kind of investment.

Kevin Danner, the CEO and founder of Carbon Lock Tech, a carbon sequestering technology company, said there are so many things a founder needs to pay attention to while developing a company that making time and money available for an IP strategy can be hard to do. (It now has Canadian patents with U.S. patents expected in the coming weeks.)

Foster said Manitoba’s cost-conscious startups have been so lax as to not even regularly require employees to sign non-disclosure agreements regarding proprietary technology.

But there’s plenty of evidence that a sound IP strategy can translate into success for tech companies.

According to the 2024 IP Canada Report, businesses with a formal IP strategy tend to receive financing amounts 2.4 times higher than those without. Of the 30 per cent of Canadian firms that reported developing product innovations between 2019 and 2022, just 38 percent of those protected their IP.

Foster said, “Without stronger IP protection for emerging technologies we risk losing innovation to better funded international players.”

One long-time Winnipeg tech company founder said large international companies are opportunistic when it comes to infringing on smaller companies’ IP and will take the chance if they believe it will not be defended.

Among other things the message at the IP Summit was don’t wait until your innovation is at risk.

“If we don’t prioritize IP now Canada risks becoming a nation of ideas that others profit from,” said Foster. “An IP strategy is not a luxury, it is a necessity.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca