Canadian entrepreneurs keep bringing knives to the intellectual property gunfight, according to Louis Carbonneau, a former Microsoft executive and CEO of Tangible IP. In a recent op-ed, Carbonneau argues that the country's innovators are dangerously naïve about owning, protecting, and extracting value from their ideas.
The IP literacy crisis
Carbonneau recounts a cancelled McGill University program on IP strategies due to lack of registrations, calling it a data point capturing Canada's IP literacy crisis. He notes that after 15 years at Microsoft, he has observed American entrepreneurs generally have a working understanding of IP, while Canadian counterparts often do not.
Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of BlackBerry, has been sounding the alarm for over a decade, stating that Canadian policy remains grounded in industrial-era concepts. Only about 12% of patent applications at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office involve Canadian inventors, and nearly three-quarters of Canadian inventions are filed in the United States.
Structural and cultural factors
The problem is structural, cultural, and institutional. Canada ranks 14th in the 2024 Global Innovation Index but produces just over half the patents predicted by its academic research quality and quantity. Carbonneau identifies five reinforcing factors that have compounded over decades:
- Lack of IP education in business and engineering programs
- Insufficient government support for IP strategy development
- Cultural mindset that treats IP as an afterthought
- Limited access to IP expertise for startups
- Weak enforcement of IP rights
Carbonneau concludes that IP is not an afterthought in the knowledge economy but core to Canadian sovereignty. He calls for systemic changes to close the gap with the United States and ensure Canadian innovators can compete globally.
