If you're asking for specific figures, which is a very legitimate question, these are hard to come by, but there have been studies and there are ongoing studies of the return on investment in research in a number of countries. In general, overall, the return is something in the order of seven to one. In other words, for every dollar invested in the research enterprise, ultimately there's a benefit, a return on investment in the order of seven dollars.
The difficulty is that, as Dr. Godbout mentioned, it's not an immediate outcome. It's not an assembly line where research goes in at one end and economic benefit comes out a short time later. Depending on the field, it can be 10 to 15 years, sometimes even longer, and it's not linear. We can connect the dots in retrospect, but it's very difficult to predict them going forward. Nevertheless, history has demonstrated that the dots indeed can be connected and that there is an economic return.
In addition to that, if I can take another 30 seconds, those of us who are in the research-funding organizations are not simply relying on history or faith that this will happen. We are trying to actually document it, and at CFI, for example, we are completing a study of spin-off companies at universities whose creation depended, to a considerable extent, on the infrastructure provided by CFI.
Now, keep in mind that the bulk of these investments have been made only during the past five or six years. There are already 94 spin-off companies that meet that description, and they have attracted capital investment through venture capital and IPOs of $1.1 billion. So this is just the early stages. In other words, we're talking about the first five, six, or seven years of CFI investments that have led to that sort of economic benefit. I anticipate, as we continue these studies and the further out we go, that we will see a much larger impact.