La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : revue des expériences au Québec, au Canada et à l'international. Document d'accompagnement

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : revue des expériences au Québec, au Canada et à l'international.

Ce document, produit en appui à l'avis que vient de diffuser le Conseil, La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : Pour une véritable dynamique d'alliances stratégiques, décrit et commente les principales données pertinentes en matière de valorisation de la recherche et de la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle pour le Québec, le Canada, l'Allemagne, les États-Unis, la Finlande, Israël, le Japon et Singapour. Il reprend également des extraits du dernier document de l'OCDE sur les perspectives 2010 en science, technologie et industrie.

MODÈLES DE RÉUSSITE DES COLLABORATIONS UNIVERSITÉ-ENTREPRISE AU QUÉBEC DANS UN CONTEXTE D'INNOVATION OUVERTE

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne le rapport Modèles de réussite des collaborations université-entreprise au Québec dans un contexte d'innovation ouverte. Ce document, à partir de quatre études de cas ( IREQ, Ericsson, Technar et Kinova) et d'une revue de littérature, fait ressortir les pratiques gagnantes de collaboration entre le monde de la recherche universitaire et celui de l'industrie en accordant une attention particulière à la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle.

Le rapport a été préparé à la demande du Conseil, dans la foulée de son avis récent sur la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle, par Mme Isabelle Deschamps, professeure en gestion de l'innovation ainsi que Mmes Maria Macedo et Manon Hélie, candidates à la maîtrise, toutes trois de l'École de technologie supérieure.

ACCOMPAGNER LES PME DANS LEURS COLLABORATIONS UNIVERSITAIRES : RÔLE DES INTERMÉDIAIRES ET OUTILS DE GESTION DE LA PROPRIÉTÉ INTELLECTUELLE

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne le rapport synthétique, Accompagner les PME dans leurs collaborations universitaires : rôle des intermédiaires et outils de gestion de la propriété intellectuelle.

Le rapport a été préparé à la demande du Conseil, dans la foulée de son avis récent sur la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle, par Mme Isabelle Deschamps, professeure en gestion de l'innovation ainsi que Mmes Maria Macedo et Manon Hélie, candidates à la maîtrise, toutes trois de l'École de technologie supérieure.

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Using literature to understand violence against blacks
The grim history of lynching in the United States may be over, but it has been preserved through photographs, memoirs, novels and poetry.

To Sandy Alexandre, an associate professor of literature at MIT, those images and words help make clear, in retrospect, how closely lynching was related to the issue of property, in the form of bodies, possessions and land.

This is not the first thing usually associated with lynching; as many scholars and commentators have detailed, lynch mobs were often triggered by the suspicion, whether true or not, of physical relations between black men and white women. 

Now Alexandre’s first book, “The Properties of Violence,” published by the University Press of Mississippi, explores the territorial aspects of lynching — including its capacity to uproot blacks and dispossess them of property, while also denying them access to particular places.

“Racial violence is a way to demarcate space, and it’s a way to demarcate people,” Alexandre says. “Blacks who were aspiring to, and achieving, middle-class status were effectively reined in through lynching violence — this became a mechanism to make sure that blacks stayed ‘in their place.’ And that place, as far as whites were concerned at the time, was certainly not the middle class.”

In the book, Alexandre examines this issue, in part, by studying lynching as a theme in the works of some famous 20th-century writers. The prominent midcentury writer Richard Wright, for instance, had an uncle who was lynched after becoming a relatively prosperous saloonkeeper.

A close reading of Wright’s work, as Alexandre makes clear, reveals how the young black protagonist in many of his works exists “in a state of awareness about his geographical, social, and political limits.”

Or, as Alexandre puts it, lynching “served as a kind of ‘No Trespassing’ sign, a ‘Whites Only’ sign” establishing physical boundaries over whole territories, not just, say, buildings and restaurants.

Originally looking at nature

Alexandre says she originally intended to write a book about literary representations of the relationship between black Americans and nature, but found greater focus after studying the images most often associated with the history of lynching violence in the United States. 

“What ended up impinging upon that pastoral relationship of blacks and nature was history, particularly the visuals of lynching,” Alexandre says. “That very horrifying history has made the connection between blacks and nature necessarily complicated.” Indeed, the photographic record of lynching, as Alexandre notes, almost invariably juxtaposes bucolic rural settings with graphic, disturbing images of murder.

To be sure, Alexandre believes, the intent to prevent sexual relations between races was clearly a major impetus for lynching; it just isn’t the only issue to consider.

“The pretext for this extralegal form of violence was this desire to preserve white womanhood as something owned by the dominant culture,” Alexandre notes. “White women were considered a form of property that had to be rescued from ostensible black rapists.”

But following the pioneering black journalist and antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells, whose career began in the late 19th century, Alexandre believes American literature makes clear that lynching also was a tool of social control in economic terms.

Beyond that, a public lynching often served to stake out the site of the lynching as white territory for generations after the murder itself occurred.

“Violence itself was made into an event,” Alexandre observes. “Families would bring their children to view these gruesome murders, rendering the space an inviting picnic venue for whites and an off-putting place of death for blacks. The historical heft, atmosphere, and visual evidence of lynching violence ultimately shape discourses surrounding possession and dispossession.”

In American literature, an awareness of lynching continues in contemporary times; one of the chapters in Alexandre’s book, on Toni Morrison’s lauded 1987 novel “Beloved,” examines how violence against women — who were also sometimes lynched — has often been overlooked, creating heavily gender-influenced discussions of the subject. (Alexandre is currently teaching a seminar on Morrison’s writing.)

Other scholars have praised “The Properties of Violence.” Donald E. Pease, a professor of English at Dartmouth College, calls it a “remarkable monograph,” and particularly praises the way Alexandre sheds light on the impacts, tangible or intangible, that lynchings had on blacks.

“Professor Alexandre has unmoored the history of lynching from the white-supremacist discourse to which it was anchored so as to open its accounting to multiple interpretive possibilities and return psychological and politically empowered agency to its victims,” Pease says.

Writing the book has also helped spur more ongoing research for Alexandre: She is now working on her second book, on the relationship between slavery and material possession among black Americans, in the period after slavery formally ended. Alexandre is analyzing the ethical dilemmas and decisions blacks face regarding their relationship to material things, as a consequence of their prior participation in capitalism as owned property.

A caring mind
At a health clinic in Guatemala, Paula Trepman watched as a visiting physician from the United States showed local workers how to properly administer a labor-inducing drug to pregnant women — a process that, if done at the wrong time, could have fatal consequences.

It was the summer after her sophomore year at MIT, and Trepman — now a senior — was helping to lead a global-health program for high school students. Yet the trip also solidified her own commitment to health care: “I saw firsthand how not having access to those services could have life or death consequences,” Trepman says.


A biological engineering major from Mercer Island, Wash., Trepman has conducted research on red blood cell development; traveled to Guatemala, Mexico and Kenya to work on public-service projects; and is currently developing a test for dengue fever that could be used in even the most resource-poor settings. In her free time, Trepman loves to run, do yoga, and engage in ballet, jazz and lyrical dance.

Trepman’s interest in medicine started at a young age, when she would tag along to the hospital with her mother, a physician who treats leukemia patients. Trepman saw the impact her mother had on patients’ lives, and she heard stories from her grandparents about the tragedies of inadequate medical care.

“Two of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and one of them almost died from typhoid because she did not have access to health care, nutritious food and water,” Trepman recounts. “Their history fuels my passion to do whatever I can to make sure that other people have access to those basic services.”

What’s in your blood?

In many parts of the world, health-care technologies are too costly or too difficult to use without extensive training. “In impoverished and remote areas, there may not be access to culturing facilities or other laboratory services that are needed to diagnose patients,” Trepman says.

Along with other researchers in the lab of Lee Gehrke, a professor of health sciences and technology at MIT, Trepman is working on a solution: a single strip of paper that, with a drop of a patient’s blood, would visibly signal whether or not the patient is ill.

“This test strip can be used to make a diagnosis by individuals with minimal training, so this technology can improve access to health care by empowering people at the local level,” Trepman says. These on-the-spot diagnosis tools are known as “point-of-care diagnostics.”

Trepman’s project targets dengue fever, a painful and debilitating disease spread by mosquitoes and prevalent in tropical areas. Early diagnosis could mean better care for patients and recognition of the epidemic outbreaks, potentially preventing further spread of the disease.

Using different antibodies — Y-shaped proteins that our bodies’ immune systems use to “tag” viruses or bacteria as foreign — and gold nanoparticles that appear red when dispersed, Trepman and the other researchers have created a strip that will show two red lines if a patient has dengue and one line otherwise.

It’s an inexpensive and simple technology. But dengue fever exists as four types, and it’s important to find out which kind a patient has. “When you’re co-infected with two or more different serotypes, you have a higher likelihood of getting hemorrhagic fever,” Trepman explains.

Currently, she’s working on a strip that could differentiate among the four types of dengue. “Ideally, the strip will show five different catch lines — a control line and a line to detect each type of dengue virus,” Trepman says.

Prior to her work in Gehrke’s lab, Trepman did three years of research on red blood cell development at the Whitehead Institute with professor of biology and bioengineering Harvey Lodish. She has drawn on her experiences there in designing the paper-strip test for dengue. “As a biological engineer, you need to understand basic biology to be able to then apply it to projects such as point-of-care diagnostics,” Trepman says.

Sowing change

Life-changing innovations don’t always come from labs, though. With MIT’s Global Poverty Initiative (GPI) during her sophomore and junior years, Trepman led two trips to rural Mexico, where students piloted a greenhouse project to generate a steady supply of fresh produce for surrounding communities.

Seven months of the year are too cold to grow crops, and many of the soil’s nutrients have been depleted from years of growing corn, Trepman explains. “There is poor access to fruits and vegetables in this area of central Mexico. Most of the production is done in the northeast, and there is limited transportation in and out of those tiny communities,” she says. “They might have enough calories in their diet, but they are not necessarily getting the nutrients they need,” Trepman adds.

The students met with community members, who formed a committee to take charge of the project. “Although we helped by providing the technical knowledge and the building plans, local community members led the construction and taught the students how to use the greenhouses,” Trepman says.

Trepman and the other students helped to construct 14 family greenhouses and two school-based greenhouses that local residents tended once the students returned to MIT. When GPI returned to check on the project, its members found a number of new greenhouses and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables. “People who had extra vegetables were sharing them with their family members or selling them on the side, too,” Trepman recalls. “The project allowed people to take control of their own lives.”

The many faces of global health

Besides the strip to diagnose dengue and the greenhouse project, Trepman has worked on medical-record technology in Kenya and, last summer, at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Her experiences have convinced her that improvements are necessary on many different levels: basic research, technologies and policies.

In the future, Trepman plans to focus on maternal and infant care and wants to engineer point-of-care diagnostics for expectant mothers. “When women become pregnant, they are at a higher risk for contracting many illnesses,” Trepman says. “For example, eclampsia is a disease associated with seizures during pregnancy and can be life-threatening.” She hopes to develop a multiplex test for pregnant women that would include a number of different tests in a single device.

In the face of the world’s problems, it can be hard to stay optimistic, Trepman says. But as she sees it, “The first step is to understand what is not working well, and then we can focus on developing a better solution.”

3dim wins MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition
On Wednesday night, 3dim earned the grand prize at this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition after successfully pitching its business plan to merge two of today’s most popular, and profitable, technological phenomena: gesture-recognition and smart devices.

The startup was one of eight finalists that pitched business plans to a capacity crowd in Kresge Auditorium. While only one team walked away with the $100,000 top prize, finalists received startup funds totaling $257,000.

A panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, scientists and industry professionals chose 3dim based on the strength of the team’s technology, business plan and presentation.

3dim, founded by a team of MIT engineers, has patented 3-D gesture-recognition technology — such as what’s used in the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect — to be implemented into devices such as smartphones, tablets or Google Glass. This would allow users to interact with their devices through thin air, rather than having to touch a screen.

The need for power-hungry, specialized hardware has kept such technology from mobile devices — problems that 3dim has now rectified, co-founder Andrea Colaco, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, said during the winning pitch.

“What is the next interface [for mobile devices]? … The answer is gesture recognition,” Colaco said. “Every mobile-device manufacturer is scrambling to bring gesture-recognition into their devices. This is an immediate and unaddressed market.”

After the competition, Colaco, surrounded by elated teammates and well-wishers, said the victory felt “surreal.” “It took a lot of work,” she said. “Just a year ago, we were technologists at MIT with an idea. Now, we’re here.”

With the prize money, 3dim will go “full steam ahead,” Colaco said, further developing the technology for customers — namely, smart-device manufacturers — who have already expressed interest in the product.

But no one walked away empty-handed. Each of the eight finalists — out of a pool of 215 entrants this year — received $15,000 for winning its respective track: life sciences, products and services, mobile, web/IT, energy, the Segal Family Foundation’s emerging markets track, and two wildcard entries.

The contest also hosted several offshoots: a $10,000 Thomson Reuters Data Prize for the team with the most innovative data-centric business plan; the first-ever $10,000 Creative Arts Prize for the innovative use of art in a business plan; an AARP Prize for $10,000; and a $2,000 Audience Choice Award.

Since its debut in 1989, the competition has helped launch more than 160 companies, which have gone on to collectively raise $1.3 billion in venture capital, employ 4,600 people and build $16 billion in market capital.

Health, energy and infrastructure solutions

Other finalists’ innovations aim to prevent and diagnosis debilitating diseases, deliver clean energy and fix infrastructure issues.

Several teams — NoMos, QuikCatheter, SympSolutions and eyeMITRA — are developing health-care innovations. NoMos, winner of the Audience Choice Award, aims to stop the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, by distributing a natural, nontoxic, environmentally friendly extract that prevents mosquito-human contact.

QuikCatheter plans to manufacture modified microcatheters doctors could use to help improve patient outcomes in time-sensitive emergencies, such as stroke and arterial bleeding, and improve efficiency in a variety of non-urgent or outpatient procedures. SympSolutions is developing a cost-effective and noninvasive way to treat the carotid body — a small organ known to contribute to high blood pressure — in hypertensive patients who no longer respond to oral medications alone.

Finally, eyeMITRA is developing mobile technology that collects valuable information about a person’s well-being — such as eyesight complications associated with diabetes — via retina monitoring. “It may seem like science fiction, but this is MIT,” said eyeMITRA team member Everett Lawson, a postdoc in the MIT Media Lab.

Other teams developed infrastructure and clean-energy innovations. UPower, which won MIT’s Clean Energy Prize last week, is developing a nuclear generator for places off the power grid, such as U.S. Army bases in Afghanistan, that could replace diesel generators — reducing energy costs and, in theory, providing power for up to 12 years without a recharge.

Ant Intelligence aims to collect and interpret data from buildings and infrastructure — such as bridges, dams and excavation sites — and generate structural data to be used for remote monitoring and preventive maintenance, disaster management and big-data analytics, among other things.

Finally, C2Sense has several patents and published academic articles backing its technology: low-cost “sensors on a chip” that can be used for detecting and measuring a range of chemical substances in food, or for safety monitoring and environmental protection.

Three other teams — AugMI Labs, Kiwi and Mediuum — won the Data Prize, the AARP Prize and the Creative Arts Prize, respectively.

‘Am I making a difference?’

Keynote speaker Yoky Matsuoka SM ’95, PhD ’98 has extensive experience with life-altering technologies — from designing robotic limbs to working at Google to her current role as vice president of technology at an innovative thermostat company, Nest Labs. 

Through all her endeavors, Matsuoka said she always sought to change the world — an ideal she wished to impart upon the audience. “One of the things that I like to go back and think about is this picture,” Matsuoka said, presenting a large photo of Earth. “Sometimes I ask, ‘Am I contributing to society?’ ‘Am I making a difference?’ As long as my answer is ‘yes,’ I’ll be fine.”

As a tennis player at MIT, Matsuoka sought to create a robotic “tennis buddy”: an advanced robot for players to practice against. This led to a detour into robotics and neuroscience — a field she later dubbed neurobotics — that ultimately fed her desire to help society. “I learned there were a lot of people with neurological disorders who could use this technology,” she said.

From there, she entered academia, setting out to create artificial limbs controlled by human thought. Along the way, she became director of the University of Washington’s Neurobotics Lab and the National Science Foundation’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, and then head of innovation at Google. She’s now settled on creating Nest Lab’s programmable thermometers that aim to save people thousands of dollars on heating.

Matsuoka said this human-technology integration is her passion — and the future of our technologically advanced society. “That’s what just really gets me going: building these beautiful devices,” she said. “Am I doing something that’s really helping society? I think so.”