Industry committee  I can speak to Ontario. There are regional innovation centres are across the province in every region. It's a good place for a start-up, a new company, or even a company that has a new product line to go and find help, either market intelligence or connection to funding, venture capital angels, or just connections to other parts of the supply chain.

Industry committee  Yes. It is usually people who work together rather that institutions working together. Most of the time it's this researcher who knows he or she wants to solve this problem or create new knowledge and then needs the other person at the other place. I'm not a big fan of shotgun weddings as it sometimes happens that funding agencies want to force this, but having the availability of working together is great.

Industry committee  We're perfectly happy to fail.

Industry committee  The thing is that it's more the potential of the idea that we evaluate. If it succeeds, will it have a chance to create jobs, good economic development, good training for the students? In some projects, we try our best and they don't actually achieve the desired output. That's cool.

Industry committee  We look at the potential of that project, should it be successful. Sometimes the potential is really tantalizing, but it's a riskier project and sometimes they don't work.

Industry committee  Essentially, whenever a company comes to us we discuss with them their aspirations, their problem for that particular project. We make the scope of the project, but also we make sure that up front they know what their contribution is going to be to the project, in cash and in kind, and also what's going to happen to the intellectual property, from the beginning.

Industry committee  We are the stewards of the taxpayers' money through NSERC or provincial funding, so we don't take every project. Some of them are just stupid. We just want to make the good ones, those that will actually have a chance for, in our particular case, good training, good intellectual property, good economic development.

Industry committee  Interestingly, on the mushroom picking one, Vineland needed to have their machine learn how to pick the mushrooms, so we 3-D printed a bunch of mushrooms for them in plastic of different sizes and also different types of suction cups. For example, that's very close to material. We do that type of stuff, but it had to be figured out, simulated, and tested.

Industry committee  I don't know if it would have gone through security.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. Hello. My name is Marc Nantel. I am the associate vice-president of research and innovation at Niagara College. I've been in this position for six years. Before that, I spent 13 years plus at the Ontario Centres of Excellence in dealing with IP and programs and all that.