Thank you, Mr. Chair, that's really not the direction I was planning to take.
I'm not a regular on this committee but I, too, have found this committee very encouraging.
I'm sure that as a representative of the region of Waterloo, along with Mr. Braid, you would expect us to champion the University of Waterloo and some of its achievements. I'm going to refer to that a bit later, but I want to read part of a speech by Dr. Feridun Hamdullahpur, the president of the University of Waterloo, which he gave in Saudi Arabia less than a month ago. He was musing about the balancing of research and academics, instruction and commercialization, and the value of co-op education.
By the way, I'm reading from a PlayBook, which is a great tool developed in the region of Waterloo. I hope you all have one. If not, they're great value, excellent.
This is Dr. Hamdullahpur speaking: In the 1980s, Mike Lazaridis was an undergraduate at Waterloo when he came up with the idea of the Blackberry. Rather than push him to complete his degree, his entrepreneurial minded professors encouraged him to develop the concept commercially. The result: Research in Motion was born and has created 17,000 net new jobs in facilities around the world.
He goes on to acknowledge the current challenges, and then he goes on to say: It is typical of Waterloo's culture that our inventor-owned intellectual property policy allows students and staff to retain the intellectual rights to their inventions. The policy makes the lines between the university, business and industry even more porous and leads to productive partnerships and a solid record of commercialization. More than 75 high-tech spinoffs have been incorporated to commercialize technology developed at the University of Waterloo by our faculty, students, and alumni.
He goes on to talk about the more than 700 high technology enterprises, including Research in Motion, Google Waterloo, OpenText, and so on. Anyway, you get my point.
My question follows along the line of some of the previous questions in terms of the commercialization part. Mr. Inwood, you commented about how the focus is industrial solutions.
I've been present at the University of Waterloo at different times when they've considered partnerships with an industry that comes to the University of Waterloo for help in the research and development of a particular technology—and not necessarily even communications technology. For example, I remember at one point being there when they were doing research on a better light standard that absorbed the impact of crashes, to protect lives. It was counterintuitive to me to see a university doing that. Another one we recently participated in together was the development of a very lightweight car frame.
I'm wondering if you could highlight some of those examples where the commercialization aspect, as you said, has to be picked up by private industry, but the private industry certainly benefits from the access to the university environment.
If you could highlight one or two examples, that would be great.