In terms of what OCRI is doing to help companies get into our university program, we've very fortunate that on our board of directors we have the two local university presidents, one of the colleges, and one of the federal research labs.
This process, though, of bringing companies into academia--we call it a full body contact sport. It doesn't happen naturally. There are cultural differences and skill set differences that need to be worked on. There's no cookie cutter for it. You bring them in and find out what their needs are.
Ten years ago companies were willing to invest in research, co-sponsored research. They're not interested as much any more. If you go to our major companies, RIM and Nortel alone are not doing matching programs anymore, but what they are extremely interested in is access to the people, the students. That's why I was saying our investments in research now are investments not only in intellectual property but also in very skilled people, so our access right now tends to be bringing these companies in and introducing them to the professors and the students for longer-term relationships. Then that turns into an IP transfer that comes out in the form of the students and what they've been working on. That's the number one thing we do.
What can the government do? Our recommendation was on an IP policy that would level the playing field for everyone so that everybody would know how they could deal with IP. You still want to protect the IP and you want to protect the inventors of it, but you need clear rules as to how companies access that IP, pull it out, and then look at commercializing it, because in pulling it out, you actually have to pull the people with it in order to be able to make it work.
In terms of the strategic procurement process itself--