Sure.
I want to give a short answer, and then I can provide some follow-up after the meeting because I know time is short.
Essentially, right now, faculty members are rewarded for doing traditional research. If you look at the funding the federal government provides to support university research, the focus for the most part is on publishing papers and performing in that domain. The places where there's funding to support the commercialization of technology doesn't fall in the traditional places universities look for funding. It's more organizations like FedDev and the Canada accelerator and incubator program that have indirectly provided funding to support universities who want to build incubators, commercialize technologies, and so on.
My first point is simply that our structures are not aligned to do what we say the objectives are.
The second point is that our president has said repeatedly he wants to graduate students who have the choice of a career—and Ryerson is very well positioned in that space—or create their own companies and hire other people. He talks about students graduating with a diploma in one hand and a corporation in the other. Providing opportunities for young people to increase their employability through co-ops, through paid internships, and so on, is absolutely fundamental and not disconnected with some of the things the other panellists have talked about.
If you look at the challenges many small and medium enterprises are facing in their use of advanced technology, part of it is buying the technology. Part of it frankly is that most CEOs of SMEs are worried about meeting payroll on Friday and don't have the time to change the wheels on the bus while they're driving 90 miles an hour down the highway.
There's a huge opportunity, but we don't have the structures to support young people going to small or medium enterprises and helping them harness the potential of some of these new technologies. That's the kind of thing we're working on with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, but existing structures don't support that kind of experiential learning in the ways we would like to see it supported.