Thank you very much.
I won't reiterate the mission of the NCE program, I'll just get right into it.
The challenges facing AUTO21 are the same as those facing Canada's automotive sector. We have to figure out how to maximize innovation within the available budget to keep our country competitive and keep people employed, and we have to figure out how to do this quickly enough to respond to very rapidly changing market forces and conditions.
To accomplish this goal, AUTO21 is working as hard as it can with its industry and NGO partners to address their research issues and provide them with the best possible human resources so that their businesses can make progress and create higher-value products as rapidly as possible to meet the needs of the global market. This is the mission of an NCE, and we're doing our best to accomplish it.
The need for innovation is very well known in Canada. One of the fundamental weaknesses of Canada's economy and overall economic picture is an under-investment in innovation by the private sector. In my view, one of the most important things that Canada's public sector can do is provide an environment in which private sector investments can make sense and can bring research to Canada.
The other thing that needs to be said is that this job will never be done, and the effort must be sustained. We have to determine what the most strategic sectors are for Canada and resolutely stick with them, because that's what the nations with which we compete are doing.
In my remarks today I'm going to describe how AUTO21 is contributing to the three thrusts of Canada's innovation strategy.
In terms of the knowledge advantage, we are providing support to 54 separate projects in our present program. These are all a reflection of the needs of the automotive sector for innovation in all areas of technology and practice. Our projects are chosen and judged against a set of priorities or vectors that drive product development in the auto industry around the world.
There is a need for continual progress on health and safety issues, so the first vector is safety.
There is the need for continual progress on reducing the energy footprint of the car, not just in its on-road use, but in its creation, manufacture, and disposal.
The next vector is the value vector, and that's a bit subtle. It's too easy, and it would be incorrect to say that Canada must decrease costs. We are simply not a low-cost country, and I don't think we really want to be, because that would imply a serious deterioration in our social fabric. We must strive for higher value--value being the ratio of performance divided by cost. We must continue to strive to lower cost, but we must increase the performance of our products so that they can command a premium in the market.
Finally, there is the need to improve the flexibility of our production environment in Canada. This goes for virtually all products that are made in Canada, beyond cars. The world is becoming a very fragmented market. Any given production asset must be as flexible as possible so that it can produce as wide a range of products as possible and change quickly from one to the other to respond to market forces.
Just to give you an example, 10 or 15 years ago there were between 80 and 100 car models on the market. Now there are around 400 car models on the market, and sales have not grown very much at all. The number of cars of an individual type that are being sold has shrunk from 300,000 or 400,000 units per vehicle to 40,000 to 80,000 units per vehicle. That means we need to develop new kinds of materials, new production processes, and new design methodologies so that we can create desirable products more rapidly at lower cost and then tool them up in our factories at lower cost so that we can remain profitable with smaller production runs.
This industry-led, needs-driven, flexible, and agile approach is what has made AUTO21 such a success--and this view doesn't come entirely from within Canada. Our international scientific advisory committee has said that AUTO21 is an exemplar of how to initiate, facilitate, manage, and coordinate a very large multidisciplinary research network that brings academics together with industrialists and high-impact partnerships. This, we feel, is a very important aspect of the network, and we applaud our international scientific advisory committee for that view. We thank them very much for it as well.
I'd just like to close with a few words on how Canada can improve its performance. I think the key thing is to provide a balance between curiosity-driven research and needs-driven research. The NCEs provide that key balance, and I think it's important that they be supported and be as strong a set of organizations as possible.
I can give you some statistics. AUTO21 is funded at $5.8 million per year. We leverage around $6 million per year from the auto industry. That is a strong ratio, in my view, especially given the times in the auto industry. Currently we have 315 researchers at 43 universities. At this time we are training nearly 500 students. We have completed the training of around 1,200 students in the past. The number of industrial partners we work with is more than 240.
Thank you very much.