Thank you, Mr. Fraser. I appreciate the question.
One thing we do in our organization that I think is different from what has been done in previous attempts to encourage economic development and innovation is that we focus first on the problems.
One of the things that I mentioned we have done, and it might be useful to consider it in other contexts, is to go to different groups in society, whether those be families or communities in remote rural areas or experts in a certain area, and ask for a discussion on what they perceive to be the biggest problems. We've been quite surprised, I will say, in approaching issues from that perspective. Start with the identification of the problem.
The second thing is to resist, with all that we can, tunnel vision. I'll use an example here.
When we are building new hospitals—and we are doing a lot in British Columbia right now—we tend to look at other hospitals around the world to see how they've been built. What if you look at how aircraft are produced? A lot of the things that you're trying to do when you're building an aircraft in terms of quality, efficiency and fast turnaround times are similar. You have a product coming out at the end that is better than the product that went in the front door, so once you identify the problem, avoid having only organizations that are in that sector or in that industry opine on that problem. Encourage different groups to come to the table.
There are two really important outcomes.
One is that people start to think about solutions differently. If we can encourage people to listen more than they talk—it's a learned skill—then it's amazing what we can learn.
The other thing that happens is that if an organization in the conversation doesn't have a solution to the particular problem, they hear about things that other organizations are doing and then they follow that thread. They start to build that ecosystem of, “Oh, I didn't know you were involved in this. I'm also interested in this.” I gave some examples of this in some of my comments, and I do have more examples.
There's an example I can give you in respect of a company called Terramera. They may be known to some folks here. It's very much focused on precision agriculture. At one of the events we held, a social event to get people to start listening to each other around some of our industry areas of focus, the chief scientific officer of Terramera bumped into an entrepreneur from a small company called Compression.ai, which has really exciting technology. It is what it sounds like: taking the massive amounts of data that arise from AI and compressing the data so that it's more usable and much cheaper to use. As a result of that connection, that collision, and two people listening to each other, Compression.ai now has its first customer for the industrial application of its technology through a project that Terramera is doing to improve crop health.
What I would say is identify problems; invite unusual, disparate organizations to have a conversation; and avoid having people with their elbows up who think they have all the solutions and ask them to listen before they talk.