I'll give you a little bit of an example of the sorts of things.
Part of our business is what we would call engineering work, which is quite close to market, things related to aerospace, automotive, and so on. In those areas, most of the work that is done is quite short term in nature, in terms of its application, so it's going to be developed and applied within maybe two, three, or perhaps five years. So the time horizon is relatively short. The industrial participation is higher, and as a result of that, the risk is also lower. When you put all of those pieces together, the question is simply to ensure that we are working with partners in such a way that we maximize, as best we can, the stickiness to Canada of the resulting work.
In the life science area, there tend to be longer-term agendas. These are typically five-year to ten-year type processes and the risk is higher. The companies, in most cases, are relatively early stage and their ability to pay is small, so what we're really trying to do is help them grow. There we tend to take a different approach. The approach is more to work with the companies, share the risk with them, and take the return from the success of the outcoming technology back from them and the work that they ultimately do.
Then we have what we call emerging technologies that are the sorts of things that actually come to grips with, for example, things like counterfeiting where we're dealing with new techniques of encryption or more labelling or ways of telling one molecule from another when something is imported into the country, whether it's really coming from where it's supposed to, through tracking systems and so on.
These are more pervasive technologies. These are ones where NRC will probably end up in an ownership position and will distribute rights according to the appropriate needs and applications, ultimately.