How New Ventures BC accelerated IP education in British Columbia
Organization: New Ventures BC
Region: British Columbia
Focus area: Mentoring, education and support for startups
Any company or any agency that came to me and said, ‘Where can I go? I want to get this started, or I want to accelerate in this area,’ I would point to IAC and say they have it figured out.
Susan Tees has spent most of her career as a patent agent working with Canadian companies, particularly in Vancouver and the West Coast. When New Ventures BC prepared to deliver ElevateIP, the question was never whether its startups needed IP education. It was how quickly the agency could build the capacity to provide it.
Part of the answer was an asset library New Ventures BC did not have to build itself. IAC’s research-based content covers topics Susan says aren’t covered elsewhere, and it gave her team somewhere to point learners and businesses from the start. The result, in her words, was IP education and sophistication built “much faster and much more efficiently than we could have done so without IAC.”
For ecosystem builders, that is the case for shared IP infrastructure. An agency does not need to develop every resource in-house to deliver strong IP support; it needs a partner with enough depth to draw on, so it reaches the point where it is independent sooner. Susan describes a collaboration where “we all learned from each other,” and that two-way exchange is the basis of IAC’s work with ecosystem partners.
New Ventures BC is a British Columbia agency that has helped startups and early-stage companies for 26 years through mentoring, education and support. It delivers ElevateIP support to B.C. startups [confirm] and is a partner of IAC. New Ventures BC and IAC also co-authored the whitepaper A Smarter Way Forward for IP Education in Canada, with Intellectual Property Ontario and Innovate BC.
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