As you noted, there's a different culture in terms of risk-taking. The Office of the Chief Scientist, now known as the Israel Innovation Authority, typically, in the portfolio of thousands of Israeli companies that it supports.... Its core program, just to be clear, is to provide grants achieving up to 50% of the value of R and D. If the R and D is very risky but also has the potential to make sea changes in the positioning of that company, this is seen as the role of government. Clearly, most of those investments will fail, and that's because high-risk R and D is what it is. It does not achieve the intended objective.
The idea is that at any one time 5% of the investments of the chief scientist's or the authority's office are complete successes, meaning that the companies have been able to grow to the point that they reach the next level—from start-up to scale-up, or from scale-up to medium-sized companies, or whatever—or they have achieved some significant increase in market share and that sort of thing. That's only 5%.
Another 45% have failed, period, and 50% is work in progress, with most of the investments failing. The important thing, however, is that failed ones do not mean a failure, because the entrepreneur who is supported gets incredible experience, dusts himself or herself off, and tries again. The talent pool that is created by enabling this risk-taking by these entrepreneurs is what has attracted all these multinationals to Israel.
As Canada seeks to attract, for example, the next Amazon centre into this country, what is the main selling point for anyone trying to attract these large companies and create these high-value jobs in a country such as Canada? It's simple. It's the talent pool. You go where the best talent pool is.
It's this kind of sharing of risk, standing shoulder to shoulder, and accepting failure as not a failure in itself but as a failure in achieving the intended objectives that is one of the hallmarks of that organization.
In our country, too often we allow criticism of our programs and our program deliverers on the basis of those numbers. If we were to show those numbers, say five years from now, in our clusters strategy, most of the media in Canada would say it failed, yet it hasn't necessarily. We need to basically push back on this idea that a failure to reach the intended objective is a failure in advancing an innovation economy.
I don't know whether I have answered your question.