Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd just like to give thanks for the opportunity to come and speak in front of this group.
I thought I'd start by talking a little bit about the background of Innovation Place. Innovation Place is a crown corporation wholly owned by the Province of Saskatchewan. It was started with a research park in Saskatoon in 1977 when a lease for land was secured with the University of Saskatchewan. The first building was built in 1980. The research park expanded into Regina in 1998, when a similar agreement was signed with the University of Regina. Today we have 22 buildings on the two parks, 17 in Saskatoon and five in Regina, and the total investment to date is about $230 million.
As I mentioned, the first building was built in 1980 and was occupied by five tenants. There are now 185 tenants in the research parks, who employ about 3,500 people. In 2007 the economic impact from the tenants' operations in the parks was just under $600 million of economic activity for the province of Saskatchewan. Indirect employment is estimated at over 7,000 jobs. Overall, 62% of the clients who work in the research park are in business. And in fact in Saskatoon, as a mature park, it's even higher at just over 85% private sector tenancy. Of those tenants, 71% have fewer than 10 employees, so they are small companies. In 2007 we actually saw the establishment of eight start-up companies in our parks.
Some of our observations are that there are many ways to enhance commercialization. Research parks, we believe, are part of the solution. All university-related research parks in Canada struggle to deliver infrastructure, and primarily the issue is the high cost to deliver the infrastructure to support technology sectors. The business model requires a high rent when you have high input costs. That's not necessarily conducive to small and medium-sized businesses, and definitely not conducive to start-up companies.
We believe we're an example of a successful university-related research park. As a matter of fact, I think we're the only one in Canada that has an ownership structure like ours. We attribute that success to the relationship we have with the two universities here and to the financial support from our provincial government. As I mentioned, that government support is not common across Canada.
We encourage the committee to consider the university research park model as part of the solution for enhanced commercialization in Canada and to consider ways to support growth of research parks.
Thank you.