Absolutely. The SBIR program in the United States is highly competitive. It is not seen as a handout at all. It has very structured rules in terms of what stage the product is to be assessed. You progress to the next stage if you generate evidence that shows performance and efficacy. When you get to the third, highly competitive stage, you then get the government as a first customer. That becomes a very important validation, particularly if it's a data-driven and high-performing system and is not seen as some kind of soft test bed.
This notion of inclusive growth also allows governments to think about ways to create opportunities for certain disadvantaged groups. You see in the United States as well that some of these procurement channels would be open to indigenous businesses, for example. So this can be used for other social purposes as well.
The thing that is really important for us, and we see it in the health care space—and here I can talk from my own experience—which I know is a more provincial jurisdiction, is that the Ontario health care system, a very large public system, procures, if you think about it, almost no medical devices originating in Canada or Ontario. It's that mindset of thinking of our health system as, like our energy system, a service taking care of sick people rather than as part of our economic engine.... This is one of those switches we can flip to begin to unlock the capacity of using our system.
If a young innovator in the health care space can't sell into the Ontario system, they go to the U.S. market or the European market, and the first question they get is, “What does Ontario think of your gadget?” If the answer is, “I can't find anybody to talk to at the Ontario health system”, that's incredibly unhelpful for getting those companies to scale.