To support Robert's point, any public sector procurement of innovative technology has to become a policy and a practice. Industrialized economies like the United States are very much front and centre in helping de-risk R and D and commercialization by acting as both an investor in the innovation cycle as well as first adopter and buyer of promising technology products and services. That is certainly one area the government should look at, along with the provinces and perhaps even the municipalities. It's got to be a common approach. We seem to be the only industrialized economy that hasn't really adopted that methodology for supporting innovation.
The second point I would make is that in the last couple of years, the government has been very direct, through organizations like FedDev, in supporting and investing in public-private research consortiums like SOSCIP in Toronto, which really help collaborations between industry and academia. The challenge there is that the backbone infrastructure—the computing technology—is extremely expensive. Perhaps we've made a front-end investment to get them up and running, but we need to think about investing in that O and M, the operations and maintenance, over the longer term.
I know when SOSCIP got started, it was roughly an $18-million investment in that backbone infrastructure in terms of machine learning and computing. It's about time to update that technology, because it's getting a bit old after five years. The government could be a major partner in supporting some of that backbone infrastructure and allowing industries and universities to scale on top of that. I can tell you that with SOSCIP, the dividends they've achieved by working with that infrastructure are certainly well beyond the investment that was required for that infrastructure on its own.