Thanks very much for the question. Again, I'm Greg Reade, a director general in the Department of Finance.
You're quite right that a number of programs across the government work with businesses to promote, as you talked about, some of those features. What's new and different and will be built on in the Canada innovation corporation with respect to those three functions is that, for example, in allocating the financial support, a roster of technical experts will be built with regard to the different types of research and development. We learned from international examples, in particular in Israel, that allocation of funding based on this technical expertise is really valuable to understand. There's a good possibility that the outcomes of that research and development will appear in the economy. In other words, there will be marketable products and services both domestically and internationally. The corporation is going to really focus on that technical expertise.
In terms of advisory, for example, the industrial research assistance program and their technology advisers are the gold standard within Canada in terms of helping companies and providing this advice. We'll build on that advice more systematically.
You mentioned intellectual property. In the past couple of years across government, there have been a number of attempts to promote and raise awareness on the importance of the creation and then the retention of intellectual property in Canada. This will be a core function of the advisory services provided by the agency. That's in addition to supporting companies to develop their project proposals, refine their project proposals and carry out those proposals.
With regard to foresight and experimentation, this is something quite new, especially the experimentation. One of the reasons the corporation is structured that way is to provide the board of directors of the corporation the ability to quickly adapt and modify its programming and even its advisory offerings to businesses. With respect to the feedback they receive, not only from program evaluations and understanding the outcomes that businesses are achieving but also—this is the foresighting part—by building a strategy team that is expert in monitoring and understanding industrial and economic trends, both domestically and internationally, the corporation will understand where the puck's going and can help direct how they understand their funding applications and where it is best to allocate funding from the corporation.