The Secretary of State of Investment & International Cooperation and LESI Certified Licensing Practitioner Alaya Bettaieb will speak about the economic road maps for recovery of post-revolution Tunisia and other North African countries following the turmoil of the past year. Mr. Bettaieb will focus particularly on the international partnerships required to rebuild an economy through IP-based development, and will explain why intellectual property is important to improve the growth prospects and future prosperity of Northern Africa and the Middle East.

Welcome to Canada, please watch your step. Canadian and US law is similar in many ways. There are important differences, however, that can be traps for the unwary who enter into cross-border transactions. Come spend an hour with leading Canadian and US counsel and IP owners for a panel discussion on potential pitfalls in cross-border IP transactions and how to avoid them.

Results from this year's survey will be shared and trends will be highlighted based on comparisons with the 2008 and 2010 surveys. A panel of experts across the spectrum of life sciences will also discuss their participation in recent notable deals. They'll discuss how deal factors vary across industry subsectors and review technology trends that may be affecting dealmaking. The panelists will also provide perspectives on factors that drive differences between the "average" deal values observed in the survey and high-end outliers that capture headlines. The session will conclude with suggestions on how dealmakers can best use benchmarks and comparables to set internal expectations and in advancing negotiations.

Focusing on our current business environment which encourages collaboration and joint research and development, a panel of patent attorneys will discuss: 1) provisions of the America Invents Act and court decisions such as Stanford v. Roche in application to employer's rights to employee's invention; 2) circumstances under which an employee may have a duty to assign his invention; 3) specific issues in connection with inventions originating from research funded by the Federal government; and 4) IP rights in inventions created under collaborative agreements.

In today's sometimes chaotic environment of securing the space necessary to implement corporate product and marketing strategies, IP objectives for various industries can have differing requirements. Life sciences might require a small number of fundamental patents to win over very large markets while high tech companies build massive arsenals and industry standard portfolios to do the same. But even within the same industry there are many alternative strategies for ensuring freedom to operate in the marketplace.

This session will focus on the questions of how our enterprises can best use the tools available to us to carve out our commercial space. Input from a variety of industry sectors will be solicited so that we all may expand our toolboxes, knowing that there is no one right answer in any deal. The audience will participate throughout by communicating throughout the assembly hall via crowd-sourcing techniques, including texting and tweeting, with the results seen by all.

Around the world, societies now expect oil companies to operate if the business activities have a wider and positive ripple effect to make their business truly clean and sustainable. Demand for petroleum may decrease in the developed countries over the next decades. However, the consumption growth in emerging economies will more than compensate for those declines. Regional economic development, the creation of new jobs, and strengthening local communities are becoming pressing needs of the time and have become imperatives for successful and sustainable hydrocarbon businesses.

This workshop will present, compare, contrast, and explain key findings from the LES royalty rate and deal terms surveys from the CEEM, High Tech, and Life Sciences sectors.  Intellectual property developed for one industry or set of end-use applications often has use in other industries and other end-use applications. This workshop will give licensing professionals an understanding of how value is assigned and shared in transactions across different industries within the context of upfront and milestone payments, royalty rates, and deal terms. This workshop will demonstrate how market characteristics for the 'products' arising from the intellectual property affect deal terms.