In my previous life as an academic, I did quite a bit of work on governance of innovation in public sector organizations that govern innovation, so I'll pick up on some of that.
One thing that's quite important is to have clear goals and missions, but with the flexibility to seek out innovative ideas. That makes sure that any R and D is targeted and invites that ability to welcome failure and be accepting of failure.
I think the way to get out of that, which we really need to think about—and I see this in the green building strategy—is not having rigid program boundaries, but allowing and really thinking about an innovative solution for how to retrofit a building and how it seamlessly goes from demonstration phase to scale-up.
The way to do that and maintain the accountability you need is often to have sector-specific experts within the public sector almost embedded within the private sector and working on these solutions, so that they have that information at the ready to scale up something that's working or to cut off something that's not working and not have anyone feel bad about it. This is like ARPA-E in the United States. These are the types of governance systems that you see in public sector organizations that are trying to promote R and D and innovation, and I think we need more of that in Canada.
On the building retrofit side, I actually see a way to put that model to building retrofits and not just have a bunch of programs that people get lost in.