Maybe I could take a first crack at that.
I think one very important reason is that we don't have the global companies and the ownership of the global companies that are doing the R and D. One of the benefits of our relationship with an awful lot of multinational companies is that the knowledge and the technology is transferred into Canada for product development. But in terms of product concept through to initial development prototyping and to spinning it out to commercialization, I think you'd probably find that most of the R and D expenditure done by the private sector around the world is done by large global companies very close to where they're headquartered or very close to where their large pools of capital are.
We're very lucky to have a company like RIM and very lucky to have the private sector R and D that does go on here. I worry when we see the loss of local ownership of companies, because I think it also takes with it the loss of a lot of investment and innovation decisions. Of course, this is generalizing. The pharmaceutical sector and aerospace and IT are certainly doing a lot. Those are the three leading sectors in R and D.
Given that this is the situation, what do we do about it? We have an awful lot of really good research going on in universities and in a lot of small companies and mid-sized companies, in particular, that are trying to do different things. I think we can do a much better job of trying to transfer that knowledge to the companies.
As I said, we put a tremendous amount of money into research and then try to push it into the marketplace. We rarely see innovation as a solution to a business problem. I think we could do a much better job linking up the research if we were actually saying that there is a business with a product or a production or a business problem we think we can help with through our research or an opportunity we think we can provide to that business.
You were asking for best practices. I think one of the very best practices in this area, in terms of technology transfer from colleges and universities to business, is the Ontario Centres of Excellence. And one of the very best practices, in terms of venture capital and where that's going, is the role the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System is taking. They're actively supporting OCE. They are working with OCE to provide venture capital to those companies they know, and they have some idea about how those companies are managed.
I think there are new innovative ways of doing this. Innovation is going to be more important than ever to Canadian manufacturing, because it's very clear that the manufacturing product and the process is going to demand rapid change going forward. The challenge is that it's happening right around the world, and here too, and we're competing for that.