Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
I'll just give a quick description of VMT and our experience with the CICP program.
Virtual Marine Technology is Canada's largest marine simulation company. We enable our customers to implement enhanced, immersive, safe, and cost-effective training environments, mainly to improve safety on board ships and offshore structures. We were established in 2004 as a spin-out company from the National Research Council and Memorial University of Newfoundland, and we hold the exclusive worldwide licences to commercialize small craft training technology from those two organizations.
We are a small business, in that we are less than 50 people. We are privately held, incorporated under the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, with a branch office in Victoria, British Columbia, and our primary market is the offshore oil and gas industry, with secondary markets in shipping and defence.
Our experience with government to date is that we've had great support from the federal government on our innovation agenda. The federal government co-invested with the oil and gas industry in Newfoundland to develop the types of technologies that we're bringing to market. We've also had great support from the federal government for marketing of our technologies, particularly through ACOA and the trade commissioner's office in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
However, we've been unable to sell products directly to the federal government, primarily because a company like ours, which is relatively small, with new technologies, is normally screened out on risk assessment criteria, either financial or technical. In our view, CICP is the only practical way for the federal government to procure new innovations, like the ones we have, from us.
Our experience with CICP is that the particular project we are offering is to improve the training for small, high-speed craft operators--for instance, for people who operate search and rescue craft, or law enforcement. The scope is to evaluate the effectiveness of our new product in meeting return on investment criteria. The department that picked up our technology was the Canadian Coast Guard, and it will be deployed at their training school in Bamfield.
As for what's good about CICP, the online application was a great innovation. I think you should do more of that. The staff have been very helpful, and the bid and negotiation process was typical for government procurement. So there were no shortcuts; this was a full-on procurement with the federal government.
There are areas where we see room for improvement with CICP. There's no contract extension capability within the procurement vehicle. We actually had three divisions of the federal government that wanted to procure our technology, and once we selected one, it blocked the other two. And if you're not careful how you structure your program with CICP, you may be barred from future procurement opportunities with the federal government.
In conclusion, I would say that CICP is a great program. It's an essential but missing part of the spectrum of Canada's innovation strategy. We're very good at innovating things, but we're not great at bringing them to market. This program I think will help that. I would say that the CICP program needs to made bigger. Perhaps things like IRB set-asides could fund portions of something like the CICP program. You need to enable departments to buy more units under the same procurement vehicle if the trials prove to be successful, and I think the program scope needs to be expanded to include the purchase of early stage products instead of prototypes.
Those are my opening remarks. Thank you.