Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains launched ExploreIP, which firms can use to find and license government and academic intellectual property (IP), on Thursday. He also announced $200,000 in grants to four law faculties to subsidize legal advice for businesses. And, the Innovation Asset Collective, a new non-profit, will receive $30 million for a four-year pilot to acquire clean technology patents, which it will license to small- and medium-sized businesses. The organization’s directors include Jim Hinton, a patent lawyer; Peter Cowan, an IT consultant; Chris Wormald, a former BlackBerry executive. (Globe and Mail)

Talking point: Canada’s academic IP is underused: as my colleague Catherine reported, Canadian universities and research institutions received less than $75 million from licensing fees in 2017, compared to $5.7 billion in research and development spending. And, the highest-earning establishments often bring in most of that revenue from a few big successes, like first-place University of Saskatchewan’s pig-virus vaccine. The new marketplace will give universities and research institutions a larger customer base of smaller firms for their IP. Meanwhile, Hinton and Cowan have been calling for a patent collective since shortly after the federal government announced plans for a Canadian IP strategy in its 2017 budget.