Thank you for that.
I was in Calgary last week. It was Small Business Week, and I did a bit of a cross-country tour and spent a full day with a number of tech entrepreneurs in Calgary. I found it very heartening when later that week, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce hosted its event, which is a kind of small trade expo, a tech expo, and I think over 1,600 companies showed up to participate, which was a record. Even this week in the news, we saw that there are more start-ups now taking root in Calgary than there ever have been and frankly there are more than in many other regions in Canada, which, again, I think is tremendous. Your points remain valid, but I think we're starting to see some early-stage traction, which is good.
The angle we take with respect to your topic is more local and it relates to local ecosystems that basically are designed to create a flow of research and intellectual property from universities through to commercialization and, ultimately, export sales. There are a dozen or so incubators/accelerators across the country and we've chosen these based on research and, basically, have picked those that we think have the formula right. The role of these groups is to provide that connection. So they're meant to have porosity vis-à-vis the universities and research organizations. They're meant to be a conduit into which organizations like ours and others can invest venture capital.
One key thing, to get at your question, that really defines success is whether there is an anchor tenant to almost provide big company support and offtake for a lot of the ideas and people. The set-up here in Ottawa now is relatively healthy by global standards partly because of the beneficial effects of the role that Nortel and others played over the years.
One reason Kitchener-Waterloo is so robust is that BlackBerry and RIM have left a very positive legacy there. One of the reasons you have a nice sector in Montreal around life science is that big pharma has played a role there.
So there are some key ingredients that you need to make this flow from research and intellectual property through to commercialization work. They are related to venture capital, to the institutions themselves, but also to some corporations that play this role of creating demand for the ideas and also creating a nice flywheel in terms of talent as well, and that's where we're focused.