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Research UNB hits milestone less than nine years after forming Intellectual Property Management and Transfer program

The University of New Brunswick has hit a major milestone in its effort to become a leading centre for innovation in New Brunswick.

The province's largest university is already New Brunswick's single biggest research centre and now it can add another feather to its cap - it has hit and surpassed 100 patent applications since it formed the Intellectual Property Management and Technology Transfer program in August 1999.

As of the end of July, UNB has filed 114 patent applications on 48 different technologies. In December it hit its 100th application. Those applications have yielded 23 patents for the university, with 18 of the patents awarded since the intellectual property management group was founded and five patents pre-dating the program's formation.

"We are very pleased to have surpassed this milestone," he said in an e-mail. "It is evidence of the volume of productive research and development activity that occurs at the University of New Brunswick."

Achieving a patent can be an arduous and expensive journey that can span international borders and stretch over years.

Dwight Ball, executive director of UNB's Office of Research Services, said the university doesn't proceed with patent applications unless it is "quite comfortable that it is worthwhile."

"These things can take a couple of years or more to be granted," said Ball. "It's international and the entire developed world is involved with recognition of intellectual property."

Ball said the university receives some financial support from federal and provincial funding programs. The university also relies on its private sector partners to help cover the intellectual property protection costs, he said.

One way the province could help UNB as it seeks to protect its intellectual property would be to ask the federal government to press the United States to invest more in its patent offices to cut down on backlogs and delays, he said.

In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, it's particularly important to protect intellectual property. Countries with lax intellectual property protection or who ignore such measures can suffer economically, said Ball.

"If you allow people to disrespect intellectual property the end result of that people won't deal with you and you and you won't develop industries related to those areas that require robust intellectual property protection," he said.

"In my former life I was doing work in Iran and Iran has effectively has no IT industry, software development. It's largely because they pirate everything. You can buy pirated copies of all of the software that is available here, buy it for nothing, dirt cheap."

The prevalence of cheap, pirated software makes it uneconomical for Iranian programmers to develop local software, he said.

"You can't make any money at it because there's huge competition from externally-developed pirated software," he said. "If you don't respect other peoples' intellectual property rights, you don't have any respect for your own as well."

Shane Nason, knowledge transfer officer for UNB, said there are about 62 patent applications still pending.

The university's 100th patent was focused on a multi-user antenna array that could help improve the number of people using wireless network access in a particular room.

Nason said patent agents and lawyers help UNB search to see if its innovations are unique and then help put together patent applications.

It likely won't take UNB another eight years to generate another 100 patent applications, said Nason. The number of potential patent applications that UNB's Office of Research Services encounters each year through invention disclosures by researchers has roughly doubled from an average of 10 to 12 a year in 1999 to about 22 now, he said.

"I don't see that decreasing the near future," he said. "There's a lot of discussion about innovation and commercialization and its really a key thing that universities, researchers, provinces, everybody is focusing in on."

Nason said hitting and surpassing 100 patent applications shows "the inventive spirit of researchers on both campuses," he said.

"I believe the number of patents UNB has filed is one indicator - among many - of the level of world-class research that is being done at the University of New Brunswick."