Canadian firms share green tech research

Market Watch reports.

The 12 companies involved in the new organisation, called Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), have agreed to jointly fund environmental research and then share the intellectual property rights for environmental technologies.

For industry, the trickiest area has involved what technology gets spread around, and what doesn't, The Globe and Mail writes.

“COSIA is very much about sharing what we've already created and less about creating new things thereafter,” said Bruce March, CEO of Imperial. “We're going to try to capture what's working best now by each individual company.”

It was tough to determine “how we would share and treat intellectual property”, March acknowledged. The system they've come up with allows companies to swap innovations inside the Alliance, although it seems likely there will be a mechanism for financial compensation, too.