Stephen Harper boosts funding for tech commercialization by $1.9 billion to $9.2 billion

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070517.wscience0519/BNStory/Science/home

“Our strategy will seek to expand government and business partnerships so new
investments can move quickly out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. We
will focus our efforts on Canada's inherent strengths and Canadians' primary
interests, including preserving the environment, improving public health,
developing natural resources and producing new information and communications
technologies.”

While this type of funding certainly is useful and has its place, I'm not sure how it's going to increase enrollment in computing science and mathematics. Comes back to the usual issue of how do you encourage business to set up shop in one locale over another. Targeted funding like this seems to me like a bandaid fix and ends up giving only temporary boosts until the money is gone.

Maybe the government would be better off fixing our capital markets by consolidating regulatory bodies and improving enforcement to gain some international respect, thereby improving access to capital for companies.

Brazil Takes Steps To Import Cheaper AIDS Drug Under Trade Law : Chilling Signal to Researchers or Heroic Action to Save Lives?

Brazil does it again, read the whole story on

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=614&res=1024&print=0

"The government of Brazil has issued a license that will allow the importation of cheaper versions of a patented HIV/AIDS drug after negotiations failed to bring about agreement on price reductions with Merck, the US company holding the patent. Merck said it was “profoundly disappointed,” as Brazil’s action sparked a flurry of positive and negative reactions. "

"Thailand offered three compulsory licenses in late 2006 and early 2007 for two HIV/AIDS drugs (including efavirenz) and a heart disease drug (IPW, Public Health, 12 March 2007). Among other countries that have issued CLs for pharmaceuticals are Canada, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia and Mozambique, the Brazilian Health Ministry said. "

Remember Canada did it in the times of Anthrax scare, when Apotex manufactured huge stocks of Ciprofloxacin (patent held by Bayer) ...

Seems like other countries might follow the suit....Novartis is fighting a court case in India for another patent violation...The IP battle in pharmaceuticals is really heating up....

Pharmaceutical sector In Edmonton: Is the glass half full or half empty??

The Pharmaceutical sector in Edmonton has still to realize its full potential. with population expected to double in next 3-4 years (at the rate of 10% growth), the need for drug products is going to increase significantly. In addition to that the intensive research at the drug molecule level will demand the formulation of such drug substances, in order to take them from labscale to clinic for trials and market. this represents an opportunity for people in field of Pharmaceutics, Analytical sciences, regulatory fields and training institutions.
Talking of profits, the pharmaceutical sector has always been a very profitable venture with very steady growth rates rivaled only by IT in term of magnitude (not steadiness).

As a personal interest, I am looking into specific opportunities in the field and perhaps prepare a report that can then be used by interested parties. If any of my fellow bloggers are interested in partenering on such a project, please give me a shout......or let me know if such a report already exists...

Alberta invests $130-million in ‘the science of small’

What are your thoughts on how these resources should be most effectively used??

The following is part of press release by Alberta Advanced Education and Technology on May 2, 2007. ..

Investing in ‘the science of small’ will help generate huge returns for Albertans, said Premier Ed Stelmach, unveiling the province’s strategy to capture a $20-billion market share of the world’s burgeoning nanotechnology market.

“Our $130-million investment today will help Alberta represent part of the competitive nanotech market by 2020,” Stelmach said. “That investment can grow to an estimated $20-billion in new economic activity, helping build a stronger Alberta.”

Doug Horner, Minister of Advanced Education and Technology, said the three-pillar strategy to grow new nanotech businesses, garner nanotech talent and build nanotech infrastructure will propel Canada to be among the top five countries in the world for nano-based economic activity.

“Nanotechnology lets us discover the unique properties of materials and how we can manipulate them at molecular levels to develop products that are stronger, faster or smarter,” he said.

The province already enjoys a solid nanotechnology base because industry, government and academic institutions collaborate on research and innovation. A new $5.5-million entity called nanoAlberta will further that collaboration.“nanoAlberta will guide partnerships with industry, post-secondary institutions and government, and it will look for opportunities to make the biggest economic and social impact for Albertans,” he added.

“Alberta has shown a commitment to the future of the province by taking its investments in nanotechnology to the next level,” said Dr. Peter Hackett, President and CEO, Alberta Ingenuity. “Alberta Ingenuity is strongly aligned with the province’s plans, and we are looking at this as an opportunity to transform the research landscape in Canada by recruiting exceptional people to the province, providing exceptional support and creating exceptional results that benefit all Albertans.”
The province expects nanotechnology will accelerate innovation in Alberta’s traditional sectors of energy, agriculture and forestry as well as environmental, health and medical technologies.

Candace Toews, Communications
Alberta Advanced Education and Technology
Candace.Toews@gov.ab.ca

THE NEED FOR DIALOGUE AND MORE EFFECTIVE NETWORKING

There is an important conversation happening about technology commercialization in Alberta. Doug Horner, the new Minister of Advanced Education and Technology recently established a task force on Productivity, Value Added and Commercialization to evaluate how to accelerate economic diversification via technology commercialization. While this task force is reaching out to many key stakeholders, we need wider democratic participation on these issues.

What are the key issues and what are some possible solutions? Many emphasize the problem of the lack of capital. Perhaps it would be useful to create a government sponsored venture fund. Perhaps we do need more angel investing. But this Province has a great deal of wealth with many latent angels--so perhaps the techcom community has not figured out how to cultivate enough attractive opportunities that are being developed with experienced managers and entrepreneurs?

We have a lot of great science and technological development at universities such as U of A, but much of this sits on the shelf and never gets connected to people with business experience to move it towards commercialization effectively. How can we catalyze such processes and enable knowledge flows and entrepreneurialism to occur at the interstices between university and industry, scientists and graduating MBAs, nascent organizations and patient capital.

While I believe that there many gaps in the techcom infrastructure that need to be addressed, we also have many valuable resources in the form of great scientists and technoscientific ideas, small and medium enterprises, and seasoned managers and entrepreneurs. We also have many diverse initiatives across various institutions. Much could be gained by harnessing these extant resources much more effectively through the creation of denser networks of interaction. Perry Kinkaid's efforts in creating the Alberta Council of Technologies is ememplary in this regard, but we need many more such initiatives and many more Perry Kinkaids. In addition to industry development via cluster building, we need entrepreneurial opportunity development through networking and efforts to create networks of networks, fostering the creation of brokers who act as links across different networks.

A key problem is information asymmetry and the ability to link, for instance, the scientist with her useful technological idea to the right business mind who can see how to translate that upstream idea into an application and product. Organizations like TEC Edmonton and UTI are obviously key elements in this translation of idea to product, but have limited capacity. We need to build a broader networking infrastructure to make this happen. Communication modalities such as this blog can help to seed this, but the community needs to crescively emerge. It cannot be forced or strategically managed. DIALOGUE IS THE STARTING POINT! WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?

TEC Student Entrepreneurship Program

Today was the official launch of the Ingenuity Enterprise Program which includes the TEC Student Entrepreneurship Program supported by the Technology Commercialization Centre (TCC) at the University of Alberta School of Business in collaboration with TEC Edmonton and Alberta Ingenuity. We identify technologies around campus and form teams with MBA students to conduct analyses and develop technology commercialization plans to move science and technology into the marketplace. This year was our first pilot program and we had many MBA students involved in technologies including a new software search engine based on artifical intelligence, an eco-sensitive wood preservatives, mobile telecommunications hardware, and a new method for the introduction of genes into plants via cholorplast transformation. My hope is that the students and other stakeholders involved in these projects will contribute to this blog to discuss their experiences, but also that this communication modality will be used to construct a broader dialogue about technology commercialization in the greater Edmonton and Alberta-wide community.

Technology commercialization is absolutely crucial to spur economic growth and development as well as diversification of the economy. We have great science and a great deal of government money has helped to build this resource. Much less attention has been paid to how we can build on this science to foster economic growth and development--that is how to enable commercialization of science and technology. To do this requires the creation of a broad infratsructure as well as a change in cultural understandings that make technology commercialization an appropriate focal point for our star scientists as well as for our taxpayer dollars. While I have many ideas on this topic, I will leave this post purposively short and encourage others to contribute their ideas and foster a dialogue on these issues. My hope is that this blog may be used as a central point for such a broader dialogue between university, industry, government and others as well as a place for network building and solving practical problems related to technology commercialization. Let the interaction begin!

Professor Michael Lounsbury
ml37@ualberta.ca

Patent Infringement

Since working on the ultracapacitor project I have been following the ultracapacitor market a little bit. And low and behold, today there's a news item that Maxwell Technologies, the market and patent leader, got a preliminary injunction against the Korean company NessCap, one of the companies I mentioned that doesn't have any IP:

http://www.sys-con.com/read/360713.htm

Maxwell Technologies, Inc. announced today that
a federal district court in the Southern District of California has issued an
order finding that Maxwell has established a likelihood of its success in the
patent infringement action it filed against Nesscap, Inc. and Nesscap, Ltd.
("Nesscap") in October 2006, accusing Nesscap's ultracapacitor products of
infringing two of Maxwell's U.S. patents. The court also determined that Maxwell
would be irreparably harmed if a preliminary injunction does not issue. As a
result, U.S. District Judge John A. Houston ruled that a preliminary injunction
will issue, prohibiting Nesscap from making, using, selling or offering to sell
its prismatic ultracapacitors in the United States while the litigation is
pending.

...On a related note, after Maxwell brought its infringement action against
Nesscap in San Diego in October 2006, Nesscap filed a patent infringement action
against Maxwell in federal district court in Delaware in December 2006.

So looks like NessCap does have one or more patents, I just couldn't find it. Too bad the patent # isn't referenced in the article.

I wonder if anybody came across some information regarding licensing of technologies. The Open Innovation book talks about most patents being near worthless, but then you hear about IBM's patent portfolio generating over a billion in revenues every year. So what do licensing agreements typically look like? % of revenue? Flat fee?