Absolutely. Yes, Britain has been the pioneer in this so-called area of social finance, led by Sir Ronald Cohen, one of the world's grandfathers of venture capital. He has been exploring for the last 12 to 15 years models of partnership between the public and private sectors. It was pioneered in the U.K. with a task force.
We had an equivalent task force in Canada in 2010 that published a set of recommendations. Some of those include the foundation sector, for example, which includes, in this context, the very large disease-based foundations, whether it's heart and stroke, or arthritis, and so on, coming into partnership with the public and more direct private investors to build performance-based models of investing in health technologies. So you can see, if I'm heart and stroke, rather than just giving grants to researchers for heart and stroke research, can I partner to better manage chronic heart disease, or invest in a diagnostic technology in partnership with other actors? There are a number of vehicles, and the social impact bond is one of them, where essentially you are sharing the upside benefit. It's really a partnership that says it pays when outcomes are achieved.
It's tricky to do in health care because you need the longitudinal evidence to know what line you're shifting over typically a fairly long period of time, but we're deep in that experiment, so I'm very curious to see how it plays out. There has been a lot of interest from both the public and the private sectors.