Thank you, Barry.
And thank you for giving us the opportunity to discuss this area, which is very important.
The ICTS sector is clearly an enabling, horizontal type of sector to other technologies in other areas. If we look at the two key words of “productivity” and “innovation”, clearly we are in the best position to impact these two. If you consider innovation and the importance for Canada, we were ranked number 14 out of 17 by the Conference Board of Canada a year ago, and productivity-wise we were 22% below the Americans. So we need to improve on both of these aspects.
How do we address that? I would like to discuss a couple of statistics and then talk about trends, because the trends are important to us. The Canadian government recognizes how important these trends are that are taking place outside of Canada and that will impact what we're doing.
In terms of the ICTS sector, we are 32,000 companies, about 600,000 employees, and our total revenue is about $130 billion. On average, our growth was about 8%, against a GDP of about 3.4%.
If there is one area that is very important to us, as I said, it is to look at the trends. I'm going to use a couple of examples that will bring the point home very rapidly.
Number one, take the iPod and what happened with that. There is a company, Apple, that dethroned, literally overnight, a company of the size of Sony, which was the king of the Walkman in portable entertainment. They were dethroned overnight basically with the invention of the iPod, which addressed the user experiences, the user needs.
These are the trends. I'll give you more examples. When you are addressing user needs, user experiences, manufacturing and technology is not as important, and you can dethrone an incumbent overnight in this area.
Another good example is Procter & Gamble with their Swiffer. They put somebody in a household and watched for a few weeks. They recognized that the family was not using the vacuum cleaner when there were little spills. There is the eureka moment where they are going to develop the Swiffer, where you don't need a vacuum when you have something else to address small user experiences.
The last piece that is important to us, as we see the baby boomers arriving, is the use of the Wii. The largest-growing segment of the market right now for the Wii is for physical fitness by retirees, by the people who are at home, who need to exercise. They are using this. This is an unintended use of this kind of process.
What is the conclusion? Why is it so important to us? It is important because the trends that are taking place around the world are going to happen irrespective of what policies we are making here. We have to be really in tune with what's happening, and the one area that is very important is to recognize that the Internet, the Web 2.0, the social networks, are the ones we really have to address.
In conclusion, what we would like to promote is having more policies that will enable Canadian companies to look at this area. We would like to see innovation that will enable companies to address these areas.