Learn and Discover

Canada-Wide Science Fair

Check out the information and video clips from the Canada-Wide Science Fair 2006.

Celebrating Canadian Women's Contribution to Innovation!

We would like to honour Canadian women who made a difference through their ingenuity, creativity and determination. Learn more about these women and discover how their invention had a significant impact on peoples' lives.

Protect your rights

Just as a business should protect its assets through insurance; priority should be placed on protecting IP. Some may consider it expensive to spend precious start-up capital protecting IP, but launching a new venture without it is like buying a building without checking the real estate title.

Ice Hockey and Intellectual Property

A modern-day goaltender's hockey equipment could net big bucks for any innovator. Did you know that many features from blades to blockers can be protected by patents, industrial designs, trade-marks and copyright too? Point and click on the goalie to find out what types of intellectual property have been used to protect his hockey equipment.

Think Link

We're surrounded by inventions. Discover fun facts about intellectual property!

A visit to CIPO leads to... a book!

Who invented . . . the radio, basketball, the snowmobile, the pacemaker, the electric cooking range, kerosene, fibre optics, the synthesizer, insulin, standard time, Java software, canola, the cobalt bomb and the artificial human heart? Why Canadians, of course! You can find out more about these inventions (and many others) in Inventing Canada, by Roy Mayer. This book, published in 1997, (ISBN 1-55192-113-8) pays tribute to some Canadian inventors over the last hundred years.

An inventor himself, Mr. Mayer is familiar with the various sources of information available at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). It is not surprising, then, that he started his research by consulting TechSource, the Canadian automated patent system.

Consult the CIPO databases to find out whether your idea is truly original. To get off to a good start, when thinking innovation, think "CIPO". It's worth a look!