Industry committee  Actually, the IMRIS case was one of learning by making mistakes. It would have been much faster if we had had better coaches; I think the concept of mentorship in the commercialization business is very important. We are also trying to do that here in Winnipeg, taking some folks

Industry committee  I am no expert in that, but because I work in Alberta quite a bit, it has been suggested that we find people who are willing to do that, because it works very well in the petroleum industry—

Industry committee  —and the mining industry in particular. So I think it is a good idea. People need to know what it is; there is an educational problem there, I think. There's not such an awareness of it in the market in general.

Industry committee  They would promise, let's say, “If you lose, we'll give you 50% of your loss”, or something like that. You can't guarantee 100%; that would be ridiculous, and people would go crazy. But there has to be some way to offset. It could be that you use your loss as a special tax incent

Industry committee  I work a lot with the University of Manitoba, and I think that has changed enormously over the last five years. I'm part of an advisory group for the faculty of engineering that is interested in what they can do in medicine, for example. Now we're trying to give them some real-li

Industry committee  I think we're managing okay without any help. It's a question of will and time. How much time do you have to devote to things that are not directly productive--in other words, investing your time as opposed to your money? Once you've seen success, it's easier to do it again. That

Industry committee  It's very simple: show them a success. That's what has happened in California. They started very small. The CalPERS union is a very large union. As I tried to explain, take a very teeny percentage of your resources—take one-hundredth of one percent of your $20 billion, invest it

Industry committee  That's a surprising one, isn't it? What two industries could be more different than the auto industry and the medical industry? What we were talking about was high-frequency ultrasound, which is used in the automobile industry to look for bad welds. It gives a very good picture,

Industry committee  We follow them in the beginning, because we incubate them. So at the moment the company is formed, usually we rent them space. We have them in physical proximity. Then as they grow, they usually move out. We have an incubator building now. I mentioned that in my speech. Now they'

Industry committee  We give advice, and from then on we give research on a contract basis. So they actually have someone they know, trust, and understand with whom they can now work on a commercial basis, but with full efficiency, because they know the people they are dealing with. And that is still

Industry committee  I think there's a realization today in the major granting organizations that interdisciplinary research is the way to go. Nobody can know everything, and often you involve many disciplines. There are such things at NSERC and CIHR called interdisciplinary grant programs. You must

Industry committee  There's a committee called PAGSE. Do you know PAGSE? It meets with members of Parliament once a month in Ottawa and it invites representatives from the scientific community to give talks. I know this because I gave one on commercialization of medical devices to an audience of m

Industry committee  It all has to do with communication and will. In a smaller town it's a little easier I think than it is in a larger town because there's a loyalty. When A goes to B and asks for help for such and such, you're more likely to receive a positive response in a community of under a mi

Industry committee  One of the things we've tried to do here in Winnipeg is to attract the pension funds. There is something of the order of $2 billion worth of pension funds in Manitoba. Most of them are invested in parking lots and apartment blocks. When we ask why they don't take a little more ri

Industry committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for having me here today. It is a great pleasure to be with you today. For nearly a century, NRC has excelled at putting science at work for Canada, advancing knowledge, generating technological solutions for Canadian industry,