91��ɫ

A chemist and a law clinic do not, on paper, belong in the same sentence. One works in molecules and catalysts; the other in the complex language of the legal system. But innovation rarely respects the boundaries of a faculty, and the story of how Christopher Caputo’s chemistry found its way to the Intellectual Property (IP) Innovation Clinic at Osgoode Hall Law School is a small case study in what happens when two very different corners of a university start solving a problem together.

It is also a story about a quiet but important idea: that innovation and commercialization are not the same as starting a company. Sometimes they begin with a patent. Sometimes it is through a licence. Sometimes simply a researcher understanding, for the first time, what their discovery might be worth in the world.

Caputo arrived at 91��ɫ by an unusual route. After an undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor and a PhD at the University of Toronto, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, then did something most academic chemists never do: he went to industry, joining the tattoo start-up company Inkbox to help them figure out how plant and natural dyes can be transformed into long-lasting temporary tattoos. He then landed his faculty position and a Canada Research Chair at 91��ɫ.

That detour matters, because it means Caputo came into academia already fluent in two languages, the language of fundamental science and the language of commercialization. His lab reflects the same duality. Part of the work is purely curiosity driven; part is applied, aimed at real-world problems.

He describes the underlying science in plainspoken terms: almost everything we use, from pharmaceuticals to agrochemicals to petrochemicals, has to be made chemically, and making those molecules often depends on a catalyst. One thread of his applied research looks at how to run that chemistry using less scarce rare-earth and precious metals, a question with obvious commercial and environmental stakes.

“Everything around us has to be made chemically, and a lot of that depends on a catalyst. If you can do that chemistry with materials that aren’t rare or precious, you’ve changed not just the science but the economics of it. That’s where the research starts to matter outside the lab,” says Caputo.

After the success with Inkbox, Caputo began to design exploratory research projects that could lead to translatable, commercial technologies. While his scientific training gave him a strong grasp of the academic literature, it gave him no insight into the patent landscape – whether the idea had freedom to operate, or which companies were already active in the space.

The answers were sitting in another faculty entirely. The IP Innovation Clinic was at Osgoode Hall Law School by its founding director Professor Pina D’Agostino, modelled on IP clinics in the United States. Its purpose is twofold, and the two halves reinforce each other.

On one side, the clinic gives inventors meaningful help at an early and often decisive stage when the costs of professional counsel can be prohibitive. On the other, it gives law students something still rare in Canada: hands-on, clinical experience in IP and related areas of law.

“The clinic was built to do two things at once: give inventors and entrepreneurs real support at a stage when they often can’t afford it and give law students the chance to work on real files, with real inventors, under professional guidance. There are only a handful of clinics like it in the country,” says Joseph Turcotte, IP Innovation Clinic Director, Osgoode Hall Law School.

The clinic's impact has grown steadily over the years. Since 2020, with the help of key legal profession and industry partners, it has provided 647 strategic IP consultations, conducted 244 patent searches and 186 trademark searches for researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs. Over its lifetime, the clinic has provided more than 5,700 hours of pro bono assistance valued at approximately $2.6 million, while also helping train over 300 students. Those numbers reflect the clinic’s goal of addressing the between invention and commercialization.

Since 2023, the clinic has also worked closely with 91��ɫ's Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation (VPRI) to provide researchers with a more streamlined pathway to IP strategy and commercialization support. Backed by funding from Intellectual Property Ontario, the partnership connects legal, business development and commercialization expertise, making it easier for 91��ɫ researchers to protect discoveries and explore pathways to real-world impact.

For a researcher like Caputo, the collaboration with the clinic quickly became more than a patent exercise: it gave him a broader understanding of the IP landscape surrounding a new area of research he was exploring. It mapped the companies already active in the field, helping identify both competitors and potential collaborators. Exploring the patents themselves was also a valuable source of insight.

“Within the patents are a lot of detailed chemistry that may not be found in academic literature,” says Caputo. "This knowledge helped guide my project in areas that are not covered by the existing IP. Overall, working with the clinic helped our team focus our limited research time and resources on questions that were both scientifically promising and commercially distinct.”

If there is one idea that animates this collaboration, it is that innovation does not have to equal becoming a company founder. That narrow definition can limit the potential. It discourages busy faculty members with established research programs because the prospect of running a startup may be incompatible with the careers they have already built and the commitments they already balance. Yet, their contributions may be crucial to solving societal challenges.

Both Caputo and the clinic push hard against that assumption. A discovery does not have to become a company. It can be protected via IP, licensed or commercialized or brought to society in any number of ways.  It can also advance knowledge and create value without a commercial outcome. It can create an opening for a student to carry an idea forward. The point is not the company; the point is moving an innovation from the lab toward the world, in whatever form fits.

“A researcher might never want to run a business, but their work can still be protected via IP, licensed or commercialized, or open a door for a student to take it somewhere new, or be disseminated for public good,” says Turcotte. “When we treat research and scholarship that broadly, a lot more people see a place for themselves in what we do.”

Caputo speaks about the challenges of balancing the demands of fast-paced entrepreneurship and commercialization with an academic career, and with the candour of someone who knows his own path is hard to replicate. His Canada Research Chair reduces his teaching load, providing the capacity and resources to run two parallel research programs. He is the first to say that not every researcher has those privileges, which raises a harder question: what is needed to enable this path for anyone who is interested in bringing their innovations from academia to society?

“I’ve been very lucky. My research chair buys me time, and tenure provides me the freedom to pursue these opportunities. Not everyone has that. The real question is how we make this path open to people who don’t, so it isn’t only available to the few who can afford to take the risk,” says Caputo.

It is a question without a tidy answer, and a timely one. The push toward commercialization and entrepreneurship is coming from the province and being discussed across the sector, from the Council of Ontario Universities to senior leadership at 91��ɫ. Caputo frames it as more than a policy directive, calling it a generational shift in how students, especially undergraduates hungry for direction, think about what a science career can be. This summer, as incoming head of Bethune College, he intends to bring exactly that lens to a new group of students.

That generational shift is most visible in the students themselves, and it is where this collaboration ultimately pays off. The clinic exists not only to serve inventors like Caputo but to train the next generation of practitioners who will sit at the intersection of law, science and commercialization, the people who support the inventors and innovators in achieving their dreams.

“I find it very rewarding to work with early-stage inventors and innovators, as someone who’s gone through the patent process myself,” says Ryan Nodder, a third-year student at Osgoode. “Having commercialization at the forefront before you begin your research is a great first step; understanding the IP landscape gives you an idea of how you're positioned in the field — not only from a research perspective, but also in terms of intellectual property, and the activities of competitors and potential future collaborators.”

“It's better to look at IP in the beginning rather than when you're deep in the trenches of a project. A lot of what we do at the clinic is reach out to 91��ɫ researchers and invite them to consult with us, even if they’re at the early stages of their project, like Dr. Caputo was,” says Ida Hadjfooroush, an Osgoode alumnus. “Working with Dr. Caputo in particular was a great experience. He provided us with all the information he had and valued our legal perspective. Anytime we had a question, it was very easy to approach him.”

As 91��ɫ and the wider sector work out how to make entrepreneurship and commercialization part of the fabric of graduate and undergraduate education, this small cross-campus collaboration offers a useful reminder. Innovation is not a destination called ‘startup.’ It is a way of moving new or improved ideas toward the world, and it works best when the people moving them come from more than one place.