One way to motivate and keep people from exiting with trade secrets is to provide merit based options. Ultimately as POET grows one would expect that this group would become POET employees. Security of information will as usual be paramount as it is in any high tech company.

Remember that ultimately these people will be working on new waveguide designs for new applications. And the new applications would probably be made at the request of customers. Those customers will likely request that they remain highly confidential. So the engineering team may not even be aware of who they are designing waveguides for?

There will no doubt be many layers of  security and I think Ottawa is a good choice.