Thank you for the question. I'm going to answer in English this time.
My name is Marcel Turcot. I am the DG of policy at the National Research Council.
Essentially, the National Research Council holds a series of facilities—126 R and D facilities across the country at 24 locations. We work directly with SMEs and other Canadian companies on collaborative research products and technical services, and they can bring an innovation or a problem if they have one. They come to our facilities and hire our expert teams. Often they hire them with the assistance of another program as well so that the government system is working together to support them.
We help to work out their problem and the technology they're trying to develop, and we help them bring it up to what we call the TRL scale, the technology readiness level. They may come with a problem at mid-stage. They're still developing it, but they're not sure how to commercialize it because they are encountering an innovation problem. We will lean on our innovation team and our facility. “Facility” means, for example, our photonics lab just down on Montreal Road.
Companies that are trying to innovate in a digital space into photonics and quantum space can come to that facility, hire our team, use our facility—which they wouldn't be able to afford themselves—and work out a new product or a new process technology that leads to them having a new innovation that they can then deploy into the market. Essentially we're helping with their competitive advantage so they can compete better in the global marketplace.