One of my recommendations is to create a network enterprise support office. That would be a good catalyst, if you like, to help the SMEs form these relationships. When there's a bid on the street, when there is a major DND procurement, when something is going on with the big guys teaming up with the little guys, somebody needs to be helping the little guys get together and create that super-enterprise that can actually do the work.
Right now within the government procurement, there's already a JV, a joint venture, kind of mechanism so people can team up. Joint ventures are created all the time to bid on these things. Even the large firms most of the time create joint ventures—they call them “special purpose vehicles”—to deliver a particular service.
The problem is not the procurement mechanism itself; the problem is the evaluation thing. They're risk-evasive. They want to say, “Hey, I'm not going to give this to somebody who has not done it before.” They don't know how to assess the ability and the capacity of this new enterprise and whether they can do the job or not. They don't have mechanisms for that. Although there are a lot of tools available to allow them to evaluate it effectively, they haven't got there yet.
That's where the help is needed, for both the government and the private sector, through the creation of this network enterprise support office.