There was a tradition, probably about three years ago, when a lot of the software development work went to India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, for labour reasons and other reasons. Nowadays, as the investors start looking at solving some of the problems, they often use what is known as crowd sourcing. They put it in the open world in terms of somebody telling them how to solve this problem. That becomes part of the innovation cycle for most of these young start-up companies in Canada. Pretty much in any sector in Canada, they use what is known as crowd sourcing to solve their problems.
I'll take it one step further. This really started in earnest probably in Massachusetts and California. It's called crowd funding. It's now come north and to the rest of the world.
You know about the issues with VC funding in Canada. Most of the start-ups in any of your constituencies are crying for venture capital funding to survive. A lot of the time they are surviving because individual investors come in with smaller amounts of money. I sit on some of the boards of these small companies, and they are raising funding from individuals. It is done with a crowd-funding model. They go out and indicate that this is the type of problem they are trying to solve for society or the business or in general in the market and ask if anybody is willing to invest money in this and come with them on this journey. The investment amounts could be somewhere between $100 to $10,000, depending on where you fall.
Today these two are the lifeblood of Canadian business in the start-up community. Just in Ontario, there are 14 regional innovation centres. If you go to any of the regional innovation centres, whether it be MaRS, ventureLAB, or Communitech,crowd sourcing and crowd funding are the topics that come up all the time. This is a true input into our economy in terms of creating jobs, starting new innovation, and starting new companies. One of these days, these companies will grow into bigger companies. This has a real, measurable impact.
Your second question was whether we know by dollar amount what this open-market model, using social media and reaching out to the market may look like. I don't know. It could be massive. The size of the worldwide market just for the data analytics, all of the research and that side of the business, is a very large number. It is approaching, as I mentioned in my opening comments, somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion over three to four years. That's the size.
If we want to play in the digital world, and if we want to be a knowledge-based economy rather than just a natural resources based economy, we need to play in that world and have all of the tools available to support that. I cannot give you a number as to how big the impact of social media or open platforms like that would be on the economy.