The first thing we did after getting out of the gate in August 2009 was to immediately partner with organizations that had a strong record of successful partnership with government entities in the past. These would include the Yves Landry Foundation, the CME SMART program, the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, the Business Development Bank, and the industrial research assistance program.
This allowed us to put money into existing programs to get it into the marketplace and immediately create jobs. The idea at that time, if you can remember back to the severity of the downturn, was to in fact get folks working, to protect their jobs, be they in construction or other fields. As we did that—quite successfully, by the way—we did want to evolve into having partnerships that didn't just create any jobs. That was important, of course, but we wanted to evolve into having longer term, better quality jobs.
In other files, in other reports that you will read, collaboration among businesses and academia and government probably involves some of the most successful partnerships. Indeed, businesses in Canada tend not to do as much R and D as some of our peer countries, and there are a lot of reasons for that. It's a very complicated matter. But one of the reasons is they don't have research capacity: they don't have Ph.D.s or microscopes on-site.
Most of our small businesses have fewer than 50 employees. So by recognizing that opportunity and creating partnerships with colleges and universities with significant research capacity, we were able to put out programs that basically said to universities and colleges, “Here's some funding, and how you get it is to go outside, go down the street, find a small business with a problem, solve it, and then we will pay half of that”. The applied research commercialization program was the impetus of that pilot program. It was so successful that there were 24 academic institutions with over 300 small companies joining up for that funding. We've extended the pilot program by an additional time slot.
These partnerships include everything from small businesses that have invented a wheelchair that can climb stairs, to folks who are making some of the finest luggage on the planet. The wheelchair in question was so light that it wobbled, and a college was able to figure out how to rivet it better so that it didn't wobble, making this company a winner by employing hundreds of people as it then opened and expanded its business.
Those are just some examples of how we evolved into various types of partnerships to gain those longer term globally competitive positions we are after in Ontario.