No problem.
We are talking about five to seven TRLs, so the higher ends of the technology readiness levels, mainly due to the lack of support for transitioning out of R and D and into a prototype stage. We're funding R and D. We're funding all the way up to pre-commercialization. But when we get to the commercialization stage, the well runs dry. And it's becoming a very tough burden on Canadian SMEs. This has been expressed to this committee by other witnesses; I looked up the evidence for previous meetings and I saw it in one other meeting.
The TVoD is not to be confused with the commercial valley of death. That's a completely different thing. The commercial valley of death occurs when you've already launched the product. The technology valley of death occurs when you've just finished applied research and you want to get to commercialization. How can we mitigate that gap?
We can better define the programs. We can build in some risk mitigation, some risk reduction. But in the end the organization has to undertake the advanced technical development, or technological development, of the applied research it has finished.
If a company is not able to cross this chasm, it becomes a very big problem. First of all, the question is, if we are able to produce a patentable invention but don't have the means to commercialize it or to bring the invention to market, what's the value of patenting that invention in the first place?
The technology is at a prototype level. We've used up R and D funding, and whatnot, to get it to that level, but it's not yet mature enough to be commercialized. We don't have any funding for commercialization programs, as many as we'd like, to bring it to market. So if it fails, as I said, then it risks becoming stale and unoriginal, particularly in a high-tech world, where the development cycle is less than a year typically. Canada risks losing out to other countries on a lot of potentially valuable IP if we cannot help our local industries bridge this gap.
I'll tell you what the U.S. is doing. The U.S. set up the Small Business Administration, SBA, to run what they call the small business innovation research—SBIR—program. It's really targeted towards SMEs in the U.S. to research, develop, and commercialize their products and services. It allows the SMEs to be the front-line players. SME, to them, means fewer than 500 employees. They can sell to the U.S. government—including the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and so on—without having to compete against the major defence contractors, which are, instead, obliged to line up behind SMEs and to partner with them for such opportunities and such programs. We don't have such a major thing in Canada.
Another program they launched is called the small business technology transfer—SBTT—program. It's really to bridge, again, the performance of basic science to commercialization.
I'm going to wrap up very soon.
Canada has SR and EDs. We have NRC-IRAP. We have NSERC. We have the Canadian innovation commercialization program, CICP. But we feel that we need more concentrated efforts to ensure that Canadian SMEs successfully cross this valley of death. It basically ensures that Canada has job growth, economic prosperity, and international presence.
I'll skip all the way to the bottom and just say that a recent survey was done in the U.S. by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, that tried to figure out the factors that determine a successful enterprise, especially in engineering and high tech.
I'll just mention this before closing. They found the following—