Thank you for that question.
I'm going to focus my responses on digital. I'm not informed to speak on behalf of all the others.
Building an innovation ecosystem and seeing the results of these kinds of ecosystems is a medium- to long-term exercise. It doesn't happen overnight. I'm immensely proud of what we have done through our organization. We currently have 450 organizations involved, and those range from small entrepreneurial companies through to research organizations and national and international companies.
We have run three competitive calls. Our calls for expressions of interest are competitive. You don't just have to hit our criteria—and I'll come back to that in a minute—but you have to be better than anybody else in your call.
In our criteria, we include an assessment of the technology. Is this viable technology? What's the TRL? Does it have commercial application, and do you have a plan for commercial application? One thing we're not doing is investing in your strategic plan. We're investing in technologies that are going to solve big problems and put Canada on the world map.
We evaluate that in two stages. The first stage is your expression of interest. You have to file a written submission as well as give an in-person presentation by your entire team.
The second is at the full proposal stage. We have EOIs that come through. We evaluate those through an in-person presentation as well as a written submission, and then you go to a full proposal. Our full proposals are evaluated in three contexts. We have international experts. We have more than 50 experts from 11 countries in domain expertise, so if you're suggesting that you're going to build a data commons, a digital platform, then we're going to put that out to international experts. At least three international experts evaluate every full proposal. You then have to make a full presentation in person again—this is round two—as well as appear in front of our project selection committee, which is made up of internal as well as external experts.
We evaluate the technology readiness, the commercial application, and then—we've talked about business here—we look at the business elements. Do you have the right management team for your consortia? Do you have a business plan? We want to know about your budget and who's doing all this stuff, because we don't do that.