Sure. Thank you so much for raising that.
To me, the under-represented communities, women and indigenous peoples, are the have-nots of the IP system. They're the have-nots of the patents, so when we think about having a dynamic commercialization process and system, and results for the benefit of all Canadians, they're actually not at the table, because they're not the owners of the IP. They're not filing the IP.
These figures are well documented. The Canadian intellectual property office here, the USPTO and the World Intellectual Property Organization all have studies on this. I gave a presentation to Indigenous Services Canada just last year, tabulating some of these numbers. It's pretty sad. On the heels of International Women's Day, to see that women own only 16% of patents, that's a sad day in 2023. We need to do better.
I'm doing my part, in a sense, and this is in many ways a response from the federal government. The federal government identified women and indigenous communities as two communities that need assistance, and they've done this through their programming. I was the beneficiary of that through one of the proposals I put through and my IP innovation chatbot, which is a way to automate the commercialization process to be more responsive of women and indigenous peoples who often don't have the resources—even more than just mainstream ecosystems—to ask the questions and to get the answers.
That's just one of the tools that I've done through the clinic.
As an example, one of the exciting start-ups that I helped put through the clinic is Indigenous Friends. They were essentially grad students from York University who felt very alienated. They came up with this technology and a smart app, which was then funded by the provincial government and is now being rolled out across Canada. That's just one instance.
ELLA is another group within York University that is looking specifically at women and trying to help them in their commercialization success.
There are many different examples here, but one thing that I would encourage this committee to look at is avoiding the siloing. There's a lot of money and a lot of programming being deployed to help lift these communities, but we really need a heat map to find out what is being done, to have accountability and transparency, to line up the success stories and to connect the dots.
What we want to avoid at all costs is siloing. I see it within the institution, and it can happen within Canada. It happens within the provinces and the municipalities. We all need to work together.