Actually, the IMRIS case was one of learning by making mistakes. It would have been much faster if we had had better coaches; I think the concept of mentorship in the commercialization business is very important.
We are also trying to do that here in Winnipeg, taking some folks who don't want to work quite as hard as they did when they were 45 years old—they're 65 years old now, but they still want to keep their paddles in the water—and using them as mentors. That way you can avoid some of the obvious errors, like expanding your staff too quickly, making luxurious kinds of expenditures when you really just need to buy tools--borrowing, collaborating, and all of these various things that you can do to maximize your productivity and minimize your expenses.
All of those things are what we learned. What else can I say?
Hiring the right staff is an obvious one, right, if you're lucky? We've done pretty well on that one with our company so far in finding the right people. We don't necessarily find them only in Winnipeg. In fact, in the institute we have 42 different languages. So by having the right combination of things to attract people, you can get skills that hit the floor running. That is, you want to have the employees who have the skills you need at the moment you need them, rather than having to say, “I know you're an engineer, but could you learn to build an MRI machine?” That's a slow process. So you need to do very clever recruiting, and that means doing quite a bit of travelling, giving quite a few talks, going to many different countries. We have them from all over the world now.
So those are some of the lessons we learned.
The last thing you need is luck. Who could have predicted 9/11 and all of those kinds of things? The best laid business plan can crash completely from an unanticipated event—and in IMRIS, we were right in the middle in 9/11, which meant that the confidence level in everything disappeared, except in the army. Everybody wanted security, so the smart company then moves into security devices, which we did as well.