Our team has been collaborating with Osgoode Law School in Toronto to hold a 2-day hackathon on how the Canadian patent system could be made more inventor-friendly. How could it be easier, clearer, & more straightforward to apply for a patent?
Maya Shino & Ron Dolin are in Toronto now, facilitating the workshop, and Margaret Hagan helped plan out the workshop schedule & materials. Giuseppina D’Agostino, a law professor at Osgoode, has been our main project partner. It is part of a larger research project she is working on, about how the legal system can facilitate innovation. She approached us with the idea of a hackathon, and we worked together to scope & plan it out.
The hackathon brings together a large variety of stakeholders from around Canada’s communities of judges, lawyers, corporate counsel, inventors, and academics — to work together to evaluate the status quo of the patent system, and develop new proposals for how it could be improved.
We are excited to see what ideas come out of the 2-day session — and to work further with the team at Osgoode on follow-up sessions to see ideas through to implementation. We’re also hoping that this hackathon could be a model, replicated in the US and elsewhere.
After today’s session, we’ll post more pictures and write-ups of the process — and the outcomes.
