Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
We have three recommendations.
The first recommendation involves matching funds. We are well aware that small and medium enterprises are highly innovative, but that they are challenged to invest as much as major councils or to pay the indirect research costs. Therefore, we are asking you to help these businesses by increasing funding to the matching funds program so that they can invest more in research and development than they can currently. For instance, SMEs can invest $2,000 or $5,000 in R and D, but they could be much more innovative if they had more help. There is no doubt that large companies can pay the matching funds for major programs, which can reach up to $1 million, something SMEs cannot do.
There is another element to this, which is the recognized percentage of in-kind contributions in matching programs. We would like this percentage to be higher because these companies are often able to make a contribution by providing products, staff or equipment of some kind. This could help them to be even more innovative.
The second point concerns training. For several years, we have been developing a number of distance courses and programs, but few of these employees are attending. We understand very well that this is how it is, given cost and availability issues, as well as the fact that the courses are given at the university or elsewhere. It isn't necessarily consistent with their ability to travel.
Therefore, we recommend that you support these employees by creating a special fund to give them training on production sites. The universities are ready to do it. We already have lecturers and equipment. We could improve the capacity for innovation even more if the employees of SMEs could take training on site instead of having to go to the university.
Thirdly, in terms of innovation support, we recommend that you create a national network of excellence in innovation. All our faculties already involved in innovation could both transfer a good part of this knowledge and acquire more. In the past few years, great headway has been made in terms of big data, but companies need our knowledge to understand how they can use it in innovation. There are biotechnologies, for instance. These are important elements.
Thank you very much. Jeffrey will take over.