Alberta wants to stop exporting its best ideas free of charge.
The province’s answer, announced today, is a new intellectual property office housed within Alberta Innovates, the provincial agency that funds research and commercialization.
The Alberta Intellectual Property (IP) Office will open with $8 million in provincial funding over three years. It’s designed to support Alberta researchers, founders, and companies through the full IP lifecycle: building awareness, protecting ideas, developing strategy, and commercializing what gets created.
Alongside the new IP Office, the province is signalling a broader shift in how innovation funding will flow.
“You’re going to start to see a shift that innovation funding is going to have a requirement for the recipients to have a solid IP strategy,” Alberta Minister of Technology and Innovation, Nate Glubish, said in an interview with Digital Journal.
For Glubish, the stakes are about where public research dollars ultimately pay off.
“Governments all across this country spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year funding research and innovation initiatives,” he said. “If the majority of the intellectual property that arises from that research funding ends up being commercialized in the hands of American companies or other foreign companies creating wealth for foreign shareholders, then we’ve completely lost the plot as a country.”
And the patent data shows just how big this problem is.
In 2024, Canadians filed just 12% of patent applications in Canada. Americans filed 44%, and applicants from other countries filed the remaining 44%. The C.D. Howe Institute reports more than 40% of Canadian inventions are owned by foreign firms.
Artificial intelligence, one of the fastest-growing categories in technology, is no different.
At a 2025 fireside chat at Inventures, former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie told the audience that more than 1.4 million AI patents have been granted worldwide, but Canada is nowhere near the top.
“Canada doesn’t appear in the top 100,” he said. “Even though it was Canadian publicly funded research that created the foundational technology.”
Alberta has a long history of world-class research that hasn’t always translated into Alberta-owned value.
QuickClot, the battlefield hemostatic powder used by Canadian and allied soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, was invented in Edmonton but the intellectual property behind it ended up in foreign hands.
The new Alberta IP Office is one half of the province’s response to stop that kind of outcome from becoming the default.
Earlier this week, Digital Journal reported on the co-investment authority given to Alberta Innovates and Alberta Enterprise Corporation, the capital half of the same strategy. Together, they form the centrepiece of the refreshed Alberta Technology and Innovation Strategy (ATIS 2.0), the provincial government’s playbook for growing the tech sector.
For Mike Mahon, CEO of Alberta Innovates and the agency that will run the IP Office, the problem is long-standing.
“Canada is woefully behind other countries from an IP perspective,” Mahon told Digital Journal. “We know that IP is a pretty good proxy for commercialization, and if we use it as a proxy, we don’t look so good.”
Alberta is bringing an IP advisor to the table
The Alberta IP Office is being built around a simple mechanism, putting someone with IP expertise next to every founder, researcher, and executive who needs one.
“A fairly significant amount of our funding will go to creating a stable of IP advisors who have the expertise to help companies make good decisions,” Mahon said.
He pegged the initial operation at four or five people, with the bulk of the budget going to advisory capacity rather than administration.
The model follows Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON), which launched in 2022 and pairs companies and researchers with advisors who help map out IP strategy.
“One of the things that exists in IPON in Ontario that we plan to emulate is the use of IP advisors,” Mahon said, indicating the advisors are meant to sit alongside founders at the decision points where IP value is won or lost.
“As a company is thinking about how to create IP, where to register it, and how best to think about engaging both in Alberta and outside of Alberta, we provide the expertise to help support their decision-making,” Mahon said.
The Alberta IP Office will guide users through the full IP lifecycle, including creating IP, protecting it, and commercializing it.
At each stage, advisors will help companies work through practical decisions like:
- When is a patent the right choice, and when is a trade secret a better fit?
- How do you protect your freedom to operate so a foreign competitor can’t shut you out of your own market?
- What do you do when a larger player decides to take your technology and dares you to sue?
“[We want to] make sure we’ve got the right support so that folks know how to best protect their intellectual property,” Glubish said. “Ideally, ensure that they can secure significant royalty streams from companies in other jurisdictions that want to trade on their technology.”
The IP Office’s first concrete action will be to benchmark Alberta’s current IP landscape, measuring what exists before deciding where to push.
An $8-million starting position
The Alberta IP Office is designed to run lean. Four or five advisors, minimal administration, most of the budget going directly to advisory capacity. Mahon calls it a starting position.
“My goal is for us to one day have to say to ourselves, ‘we’re going to have to increase this budget significantly because we have so many companies that are really being successful and they need the kind of advice to ensure that they stay in Alberta’,” he said.
Money is one part of the equation, but the harder part is changing how Alberta’s universities and companies think about IP.
Alberta’s universities produce strong research across AI and quantum computing, energy, agriculture, health sciences, and advanced materials, but they don’t consistently produce Alberta-owned commercial IP at the other end of that research.
Founders face their own version of the problem, because creating and protecting IP carries real expense. Mahon said the Office will have to help companies work through the financial side alongside the strategic one.
Both groups need education before anything else, and Mahon and Glubish said a significant part of the Office’s early work will be teaching researchers and founders why IP matters.
“That education piece is important,” Mahon said, framing it around the basic question founders ask themselves: why spend time and money to create and protect IP?
He added that building commercial instinct alongside research instinct is part of what the IP Office is trying to address.
The financial barrier is real, but Glubish sees the stakes as bigger than the cost of a patent filing.
“There’s just as important of a brain drain, which is if the brains are still here but all their ideas are still draining to other jurisdictions and all the wealth created by those brains is being created in other jurisdictions, then we haven’t fixed the brain drain,” Glubish said.
Where Alberta fits in a national picture
Alberta is not alone in trying to close the IP gap. Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia are working on the same problem, and the federal government already funds a program in this space.
Elevate IP, backed by Ottawa, offers training and assistance to help Canadian companies build IP strategy. Mahon said Alberta has been coordinating with all of them, with the goal of provincial and federal efforts running as one system rather than two silos.
Coordination is the near-term picture. The longer arc is still being written.
This week’s announcement is the opening move, and Glubish said a formal IP framework is in development that will eventually shape funding criteria and define what success looks like.
The division of labour between the IP Office and the co-investment authority is operational. The office is focused on the front end, helping companies create, protect, and commercialize their ideas. The co-investment authority is designed for the back end, stepping in when a successful Alberta company needs later-stage capital to scale.
Without it, Glubish said, founders often face a narrower set of options.
“We want to make sure that they don’t get forced to take only capital from the U.S. or from Eastern Canada or from other foreign jurisdictions that often come with strings that say we’ll invest in you if you relocate to Ontario or Silicon Valley,” Glubish said.
The combined pitch is that Alberta companies with strong IP positions won’t have to leave the province to raise growth capital. The IP Office is meant to get them to a defensible starting position, and the co-investment authority is meant to keep them there when the scale-up rounds arrive.
Glubish credited the Council of Canadian Innovators with pushing the direction forward. The advocacy group has argued for years that Canada’s innovation economy loses ground every time publicly funded research becomes someone else’s commercial asset.
“Strong intellectual property policy is key to prosperity in the 21st century,” says Jess Sinclair, Director of Government Affairs, Prairies, Council of Canadian Innovators. “We are pleased to see the province is taking the step of ensuring Alberta tax dollars support protecting and commercializing homegrown ideas right here in the province.”
