We have three technical access centres. I've mentioned the building efficiency one and the Prairie Research Kitchen, which is our food one. The other one is our technical access centre for advanced manufacturing and aerospace, which is one of our longer-standing ones. What that technical access centre does is provide funding for us to have researchers with industry experience inside of it who can work with our manufacturing sector or our aerospace sector.
I mentioned one of them earlier. Magellan Aerospace is accessing the facilities, the equipment and the researchers we have in that area, but there are many small manufacturers—and this is a piece that I want to focus on—that don't have the internal capacity or the funding to advance product development and that are looking for an ability to move that forward. In fact, when we did our Price Institute of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechatronics survey of industry, many of them were SMEs. There was one comment that really captured it for me. That one comment was, “We just need an easy button.” For an SME that has maybe 30 or 40 employees, it's, “We just need an easy button on research, innovation and prototyping. Deliver that for us.”
We're not an easy button, but we're a part of that, in my mind. We have the facilities. We have the equipment. We just don't have the necessary resources to meet all of the demand out there right now. The biggest fear we have is that the competition in the marketplace is very fierce and the disruption because of technologies right now is large as well, and we're not sure that SMEs actually have the capacity necessary to do that. That's one piece.
You've talked about the flight of talent. I would say that in our institutions, the flight of talent isn't as great. The reason for that is a point I mentioned earlier. We have deep integration with industry. The reason people leave, I would say, is mostly employment opportunities. Most of our students have multiple opportunities directly, before graduating.
We just recently had a career fair. Every large company was there looking for talent among our students. I would say that we don't have the flight risk of talent that perhaps others do because of our strong integration with industry and because of work experience very early on. Many of our students don't even hit the job market. They're scooped up by those working with them right now.