Sure I can, and it goes back 50 years.
I think you have to understand that what goes on in Waterloo isn't a program or a policy, it's a culture that's been there since the university started. If you take a snapshot of where we are today, the reason I think we're successful, from a university standpoint, is that we're blessed to have a president, David Johnston, whose attitude is that the research that goes on at the university should be helped to create economic activity. That doesn't mean taking some intellectual property and licensing it to some company in the States. What it means is, where possible, creating jobs by creating spinoff companies and getting behind them. So that's the first thing.
Secondly, the culture at the university is very much that doing start-ups and spinoffs and licensing intellectual property from the researchers is looked at in a very positive way. At some universities--in fact some I've worked at previously--some of that commercialization is viewed negatively. It's not pure research. It's not basic research necessarily, and it's viewed negatively, especially by some of the old-timer academics.
The third thing that we have going for us is that the students going through the co-op program typically spend five years taking what would in another institution be a four-year program, but two of those years, including the summer holidays, they're out working in industry, and many times they're working for other start-ups. So when they graduate from university, doing the start-up is not something that scares them, it's something they expect to do, whereas at other universities it might be viewed as an exception.
Lastly, the culture of the community is very supportive in Waterloo, so we have organizations like Communitech. We have other organizations that give back, that provide mentoring, provide support, and provide a local base of investment capital through angel investors that are there to take these start-up companies through the very early stages, when they're most at risk, in terms of raising funding.
I wish I could say here's the magic solution, what you need to do to kind of replicate Waterloo's success, but it's so much more than just one thing. Without all those things at play, I think that just putting a program somewhere isn't the answer. You need to address all these issues, and without doing that, it simply won't work.