Absolutely. I know MaRS very well and have a number of colleagues who have worked with it. It's a model, as I think Dr. Weaver said, but it's not the only model.
In the United States, as you mentioned, they tend to do things very differently. The Stanford Research Institute was several hundred acres of bare, barren land next to Stanford. It's an area we now call Silicon Valley, but it wasn't built as anything other than a place to house inventive people who wanted to start companies. Stanford didn't have a whole lot of say. They just had an IP policy that allowed people to run with the patents. The venture capitalists, who are all over Palo Alto now because of that, were the people who provided the seed money. It didn't take a lot of artificial constructs like MaRS or the NRC kind of development programs we have to do this.
I think you can build these, but if there's no actual company, no receptor there for the technology and no way to fund a receptor, it doesn't matter. You can have a beautiful atrium, and that's all it is.