Leo Valiquette
This may seem like an odd topic to raise in the early days of August. After all, it was a story that first broke in January and doesn’t seem to have garnered much media attention in the months since. But after my recent trip to Kitchener-Waterloo and immersing myself in the environment of the Communitech Hub, it seems that some discourse should be attempted on a subject that has perhaps provoked too little attention so far from mainstream media.
I am referring to plans by the City of Ottawa and Invest Ottawa to construct at Bayview Yards west of the Canadian War Museum an “innovation complex” that would repurpose an old 150,000-square-foot city workshop (pictured). According to a city staff report from January, the complex “would help to meet the growing demands of new entrepreneurs in Ottawa” and be modelled after Communitech and the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.
The site is nestled in a rather forlorn light industrial area characterized by weeds growing from cracks in the concrete. However, this area is the focus of the city’s Bayview Community Design Plan.
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By Hailley Griffis
Last month’s lineup featured great posts that shattered common myths about how your brain functionality affects sales and marketing and whether or not your software demo may be killing your sales. We looked at worst practices in the world of social media marketing (and how to avoid them), as well as how to pitch an investor slide by slide. Most notably, our website was redesigned and we are happy to present to you the new and improved layout. Let us know what you think!
In case you missed any of it, here is a handy recap of our posts, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
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By Denzil Doyle
It is encouraging to see the emphasis that President Obama is placing on the jobs and other economic spinoffs that will be created by the proposed Keystone pipeline, because if the arithmetic is done properly the numbers will surprise even the staunchest opponents of the project. They will demonstrate that the pipeline industry is a mature industry that uses a broad range of proven technologies.
The communications between Canada’s scientific community and its politicians and bureaucrats leave a lot to be desired. The environmentalists would have us believe that whether we are talking about the north-south or the east-west pipeline, we are dealing with unproven technology. To hear them talk, one would think that they are the world’s first pipelines and they will leak continuously.
The fact of the matter is that there are over two million miles of pipeline in North America and they are monitored by over 20,000 devices called Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Some of them have been in use since the early ’70s and the majority of them use satellite technology. A typical pipeline has a SCADA terminal at every pumping station and there is a pumping station about every hundred miles.
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Editors Note: As guest blogger Denzil Doyle addressed last month, Canada is a branch-plant economy with fewer and fewer head offices, which are usually the driving force behind the R&D needed to create a strong innovation economy. In today’s post, Maurice Smith relates Scotland’s comparable situation as a result of the concentration of economic decision-making in the south of England and how this impacts the rest of Britain.
By Maurice Smith
The independence debate is dominating Scottish political debate right now, and will continue to do so for at least the next 15 months.
On Sept. 18, 2014, Scotland will decide whether or not to remain within the U.K. The political debate embraces many issues, but the biggest is the economy.
I realize I don’t have to tell readers in Canada too much about the nuances of constitutional debate. TV reporters in Scotland and Quebec are already boosting their air miles crossing the Atlantic to produce speculative pieces about next year’s poll.
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By David French
In Part 1 last week, we addressed confidentiality agreements and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), particularly the role that these documents serve in protecting patent rights. We ended Part 1 with the question, “But what is a disclosure made in confidence?”
It’s clearly established that disclosures made to professionals such as patent agents and patent attorneys are assumed to be in confidence. Also, if the parties have agreed that a disclosure is confidential, then the necessary standard of confidentiality has been established. And then there are other cases where the circumstances imply an understanding of confidentiality: Disclosures made to a draftsman or to an industrial designer to improve the product, disclosures made to find out whether there are public regulations that the invention must meet, disclosures within the family, and numerous other cases where a special relationship exists. The problem of establishing confidentiality arises when conversations occur between business persons in the context of arms-length relationships, such as between the inventor and a potential purchaser. Are these exchanges assumed to be confidential?
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Leo Valiquette
