Commercializing Alberta’s Big Ideas Starts With Owning the IP

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

A few weeks ago, CCI brought together a group of our members CEOs for a day of meetings with Premier Danielle Smith, Innovation Minister Nate Glubish, and other senior Alberta government officials. 

Whenever we host these advocacy days, it’s an opportunity for government leaders to hear perspectives directly from business leaders, and it’s an opportunity to talk about issues like tax policy, government procurement processes, skilled talent attraction and more.

But a significant subject of discussion with officials this year was the need for a comprehensive approach to ensuring that more big ideas are commercialized in Alberta.

In the past few years we’ve seen enormous excitement about AI infrastructure and data centres in Alberta. But the thing to understand about the 21st century economy is that the data and intellectual property flowing through those data centres are far more economically valuable than the physical infrastructure.

For as long as we’ve existed, CCI has been calling for Canadian governments to take a more active role in the retention and control of intangible assets. 

When our governments support domestic firms in controlling their own patents, trade secrets, data, utility models and other assets of note, it ensures Canadian companies maximize their freedom to operate. You can find a more comprehensive primer on FTO here, but, in short, it allows our companies to keep growing in an industry without infringing IP rights of others or paying steep licensing fees.

So what does this mean for Alberta? I’ve written before about how the province has a proud history of successfully working with energy companies to commercialize the ideas and retain the technology that’s allowed us to explore and extract our collective energy resources.

CCI’s 2026 pre-budget submission calls for Alberta to develop and implement a provincial Intellectual property framework. This has been a longstanding piece of our advocacy efforts in the province, and we’re pleased to see an equivalent item included in Alberta Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish’s most recent mandate letter from Premier Danielle Smith.

The need to keep more taxpayer-funded IP and data here in Alberta has only grown in the AI era, and it’s good to see the government recognizing that.

I’ll be watching closely to see how the province acts on this file over the coming months.

About the Council of Canadian Innovators

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 150 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.