Sure. Nobina alluded to this. In a company such as ours where the ROI associated with R and D can take anywhere from five to fifteen years to realize, there are a number of inputs from the point of invention to the point of successful market deployment of a product.
When you look at IP parcelled out in individual patents and inventions, it can misstate the cumulative or singular value of one particular patent versus the market value of a product that is informed by multiple patents. I give as an example a technology that was invented at our research centre, the emulsion aggregate marking technology. We started R and D with respect to this product in the early 1990s. It took us in excess of roughly 11 years to bring that particular product to market. The product wasn't actually introduced to the market until 2003.
The initial product was protected by well over 400 commercial patents. The process of managing that investment and continuing to finance the development, the extended research, and market readiness, all of that risk had to be undertaken by our company. When we consider partnering with post-secondary institutions, our feeling is that, if there were to be a sharing of the rewards associated with this long-term commitment to bring a product to market, then there should certainly be deliberate willingness to share in the market risks, many of which are not acknowledged by the universities that we may negotiate a partnering agreement with, which presents us with challenges on several fronts. One is just the financial hydraulics of partnering with an entity that is unwilling to share the full scope of economic risk. It also presents us with internal rigidities.
In that regard, some of the most intense competition that we face in terms of bringing products to market and to continue to finance promising research and development is not from our external competitors. It's from my counterparts within our company. Patricia and I are competing with counterparts in various parts of the world within the Xerox family for foreign direct investment. We make a very robust case for Canada. I said it in my remarks and I will say it again. Canada is a remarkably rewarding platform for us to conduct our innovation business. We still have to make the case to the mother ship.
We're happy to share the rewards associated with research and development and taking value-added products to market, but our partners need to share the risk.