Annual Report 2007-08

Strategic direction: Outreach

This strategic direction focuses on ensuring that Canadian creators and innovators understand IP and use it effectively to enhance their innovation capabilities and acquire a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

A key part of CIPO's mandate is to increase the awareness, knowledge and effective use of the IP system and IP information. With the growing importance of IP in the global economy, it is essential that Canadian innovators and creators, along with IP practitioners and the business community, understand the importance of protecting IP and how to effectively use the IP system. CIPO's outreach activities are targeted primarily at SMEs and the education sector. To support outreach, CIPO also continues to strengthen and utilize strategic partnerships with a number of organizations, including federal departments and agencies, business associations and academic institutions.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

In 2007–08, CIPO continued its efforts to inform and educate SMEs on the use of IP knowledge in acquiring a competitive advantage in the marketplace. To best measure the impact of outreach methodology, it was decided to focus on one industry sector. We consulted with branches within IC's Industry Sector, as well as with Environment Canada, Statistics Canada and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, and concluded the environment sector offered the most opportunity. The pilot is ongoing and is providing us with intelligence and directions in determining the best means to communicate/engage small companies, securing collaboration of key partners and defining customized product and service tools. To support this research, initial development was begun on a survey to be launched in 2008–09 of SMEs in the environment sector to understand their IP information needs.

To encourage SMEs and universities to use the patent system, a number of regulatory changes were made during the year in order to simplify procedures and reduce processing times and costs.

A key delivery element of CIPO's Outreach Program is securing partners with shared objectives. In previous years, CIPO has worked with many organizations in varying degrees of informal arrangements across Canada. In 2007–08, CIPO's business development officers began researching over 30 national and regional organizations to assess them as "core partner" candidates. The results of this work will be analyzed in 2008–09.

Education sector

CIPO's education strategy is designed to facilitate the integration of IP and its strategic use into courses offered by engineering and science faculties at Canadian universities and colleges. This year CIPO followed up on the work done in 2006–07 to assess the IP courses in undergraduate and graduate courses.

McMaster University has established a Development Team made up of high level representatives from various educational institutions, such as the universities of Sherbrooke, Waterloo, Guelph, and Western Ontario as well as Mohawk College. This team will lead the development of IP case studies and teachers' guides that could be incorporated into existing courses. The pilot work includes an evaluation of the actual tools developed, as well as the overall cost-effectiveness versus impact of the case study approach.

As well, CIPO collaborated with l'Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec to provide new questions for use in their provincial engineers' exams. As part of our collaboration, CIPO also developed an IP-specific section to their study guide, which will be promoted to all engineer associations across the country, and contributed to an article on IP that was circulated to all Quebec members.

A unique new outreach initiative in 2007–08 was CIPO's first Canadian Youth Innovators' Tour, which followed the annual Canada-Wide Science Fair organized by the Youth Science Foundation Canada. The top three winners from the science fair were invited to visit CIPO's offices and received a personalized awareness session with a patent examiner.

Other federal government departments

In order to support the SME, education and general outreach activities, a broad overarching IP marketing strategy was drafted. This led to the development of a short-term partnership plan, key messages and process for identifying strategic events in a CIPO event opportunities calendar such as the 2007 World IP Day and Small Business Week initiatives. Plans were drafted in preparation of the 2008 World IP Day initiatives, to include the development, use and assessment of the webinar technology as a means to deliver information and training to our target sectors.

In its ongoing outreach efforts for 2007–08, CIPO continued its Bank of Speakers initiative. CIPO and IPIC offered four orientation sessions to Bank of Speakers' members, and delivered 51 IP information sessions to over 1750 participants consisting of SMEs and university audiences as well as intermediaries that represent a broad cross-section of local community economic development offices, technology transfer offices, regional, federal and provincial offices. Since its inception in 2004, 188 presentations have been delivered to more than 6500 participants.

In order to improve awareness of IP within the SME community, CIPO participated in 22 trade shows, through which it made contact with over 7250 participants.

CIPO's Client Service Centre received more than 70 000 requests from all over the world.

CIPO is an active participant on the IC Marketing Network chaired by IC's Communications and Marketing Branch and the SME Outreach Working Group chaired by IC's Small Business Policy Branch. CIPO also continued to be active in the Federal Partners in Technology Transfer network (led by National Research Council Canada [NRCC]) and the Partner Net network (led by Public Works and Government Services Canada). In addition, CIPO has held a number of meetings with key IC executives to explore opportunities and links of mutual benefit to our respective programs. A number of bilateral initiatives were identified and work began to action them. Examples of such initiatives are: an awareness session on the value of competitive intelligence in IP databases is being inserted in the Technology Road Maps process; maintaining close links with the High Education Research and Development Group of Science and Innovation Sector; and integrating an IP component into one of the Student Connections SME Training Modules. CIPO also delivered innovation seminars jointly with the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRCC) and the Canada Revenue Agency in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

In support of this work with other federal government departments, early work was begun on "IP 101" and "CIPO 101" type courses and presentations, and prototypes were tested with CIPO Outreach staff.

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Annual Report 2007-08
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