Industry committee  We're moving away from that, yes.

Industry committee  Again, if we move into a more industrial space, which we're talking about doing, the peer-reviewed articles will decline. The industrially oriented articles will rise. What we'll start to see more of is publications in industrial-type publications as opposed to peer-reviewed. Peer review, again, has benefits and challenges.

Industry committee  I'm sure there are things in there that will be very aligned with what we're trying to do, absolutely. It might not be complete, but it—

Industry committee  Oh, sure. It's a public document.

Industry committee  There are some, for sure.

Industry committee  We can certainly try to provide sort of a framework that would be useful to you.

Industry committee  Those groups are actually quite small. They're doing work that is done in lots of places that are well established in industry today. Our view is that actually there will be no net loss to Canada from that, although there will be a small number of people, some of whom will be reallocated....

Industry committee  The NRC exercise is not about shrinking. As you will have probably noted, the budget actually provided additional resources, so my expectation is actually that we will be growing, although, you know, as you go through processes, that you go up and down, right?

Industry committee  I think with your question you actually touched the heart of one of Canada's real challenges. It's not a challenge that's faced by just Canada, but others seem to have come to grips with it a little better. IP should be an enabler, not a barrier, first of all. One of the challenges that inventors have in general is a tendency to overvalue the importance of the technological component relative to everything else that has to go in.

Industry committee  Not necessarily: that's the problem. It depends on how good you are at harvesting things. A lot of others around the world are very good at harvesting things. In fact, they're harvesting today out of Canada in very sophisticated ways, some of them along the lines that we've talked about that are maybe a little more nefarious than others; but others in very straightforward ways, where in essence we're selling off technology as a non-processed resource.

Industry committee  An IP czar could cover many things, but I think one of the challenges is that if we think we can solve the problem by edict, we're probably misguided. I think we need people who understand really well and that Canada kind of has an IP strategy, for sure, that recognizes how we're going to play in broad terms.

Industry committee  Yes. Well, I obviously wasn't clear, because what I was trying to say is that when you're upstream you have less industry participation. The further you are away from the markets, especially from a time point of view, the more difficult it becomes for industry to invest, because their models discount the returns that they get, and the longer the time, the less the return in their mind.

Industry committee  First of all, I will say just as a preamble that the comment about Atomic Energy of Canada Limited being an example of the kind of thing we have to do in Canada is probably not a bad example. It was very mission-oriented. It led to exactly what you were talking about, from an idea to the commercial marketplace.

Industry committee  I won't pretend to be an expert on their funding, so I can't honestly answer that. I assume they're doing it for some reason that in their mind makes sense, but I don't know what it is.

Industry committee  Well, what I can tell you is that there were three components to MRI imaging work in NRC. One was in Winnipeg, one was in Calgary, and one was in Halifax. Halifax was the smallest piece. They were all operated as a unit. Each of the units had little bits of expertise, as you can imagine.