Helping Small Business with Innovation and IP | IPWatchdog Unleashed

This week we explore small and medium sized enterprises, often referred to simply as SMEs. And in particular, we take a look at how two different countries are working with their own small businesses to assist them with respect to innovation and intellectual property. To accomplish this, I turned to two friends – Mike McLean and Joe Doyle, who work to assist SMEs in Canada and Ireland respectively. Both Mike and Joe were in the United States at the end of September to speak at IPWatchdog LIVE 2024, on a panel titled Empowering SME Growth by Leveraging IP. During our conversation we learn about the ways both the Canadian and Irish governments are supporting SMEs, which is something that we in the United States should be doing to a much greater and coordinated degree.

Mike McLean is a recognized leader in the IP and patent strategy market. He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer for the Innovation Asset Collective, a not-for-profit organization, funded by the Canadian government for the purpose of helping Canadian clean tech companies maximize the value of their intangible assets. Mike is a leading voice on IP in Canada and plays a key role in empowering and expanding the Canadian IP ecosystem. He is passionate about promoting the need for robust IP strategies for Canadian industries and investments in patent collective models that increase the freedom to operate for Canadian SMEs.

“The Innovation Asset Collective is a program funded by the Canadian federal government to impact the ability of SMEs in Canada to build the IP strategies they need to compete in global markets, and to improve their freedom to operate that provides access to those markets,” McLean explained during our conversation. “The primary pieces are building our own patent portfolio that can be used as the deterrent for assertion against those SMEs, and provide patents to them if they need assets for a counter-assertion to continue accessing a market. We couple that with an insurance policy, so they have funds to support that work if needed. And then on the other side, we work on the education front in a capacity-building effort to build IP-savvy entrepreneurs and innovators, teaching them about the IP strategies needed in knowledge-based businesses, and the structures and processes they need to establish within those businesses to be effective.”

Joe Doyle is Intellectual Property Manager with Enterprise Ireland, which is the Irish government’s enterprise development agency, and which invests in and supports development of Irish-owned companies on the journey to achieving greater scale and to become global leaders in their field. Joe’s role at Enterprise Ireland is to promote the integration of IP strategy with the business strategies of Enterprise Ireland client companies. He provides a first line of enquiry in Enterprise Ireland on IP issues, promotes IP awareness generally and manages the Enterprise Ireland IP Strategy funding scheme.

“What we are trying to do is very similar… We’re trying to support SMEs to use the IP system better to scale their businesses,” Doyle explains during our conversation. “We have no particular focus, so, I work for Enterprise Ireland, and Enterprise Ireland, as you probably know, Gene, is a government agency, and we’ve got a responsibility to develop our indigenous industry base through innovation and exporting.”

According to Doyle, the nature of the engagement he has with SMEs “very much depends on the nature of the business, where they’re at, the stage of development they’re at, the industry they’re in.”

“Unfortunately, very often companies come to us at the point when a problem has arisen,” Doyle explained. “So, that kind of frames the conversation. And it’s about understanding what does that problem mean? What can we do about it? What sort of expertise do you need to help address it? But sometimes we have a proactive conversation with companies as well. Say they might be coming to us for R&D, and then we’ll just open an IP conversation with them. Have you thought about an IP strategy? Have you got any IP already?Where are you at?”

“People become aware of us and understand there’s help for problems they’re having, and they come and join our collective,” McLean explained when discussing how Canadian SMEs he works with generally learn about the help that is available through outreach and education efforts. “Once they join, we have an IP maturity framework that evaluates their level of knowledge. We have member companies that have absolutely no idea about IP. They’ve heard the word patent before, but that’s about it. And others that have in-house patent counsel are quite sophisticated in terms of their practice and capabilities, but are looking to access some of our specific tools. So, we need to assess where each of them are when they come in, and that slots them into one of four levels of IP maturity, so we can direct specific programming that’s relevant to where they are with their knowledge and practice.”

And while both Canada and Ireland have sophisticated programs to help domestic small and midsize enterprises, more can always be done.

“I think we need more people in the system,” Doyle explained when asked what he would do if he had more funding available. “I’m not saying that we need people that are litigation lawyers and even patent attorneys. I think we need people that are experts in innovation and that have some IP knowledge on top of that, a kind of meta advisor.”

“There are currently at least four different federal programs within Canada trying to address that problem,” McLean said when asked what his top priority would be for the future. “The Ontario government has established IP Ontario to also work on this, and several other provinces are moving in that direction as well. The challenge being, all of those different initiatives have overlap between the programs, and none of them are funded to scale. We need to streamline and simplify that set of initiatives so that there’s greater coordination, and that we eliminate the redundancy that’s there, and get all of them access to the skilled people and the right types of expertise that are needed to deliver that piece.”

For the full conversation, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts (links here) or visit IPWatchdog Unleashed on Buzzsprout.