Mr. Chair, it looks as if the IBM person here is going to be the lowest tech person on the panel, but there you go. I'll try to make this succinct so I can get within the timeframe.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, for this opportunity.
As you know, IBM is one of the country's largest private enterprises in R and D, and Madam Dubé was pointing out how others maybe should do as much. We try to do a lot. We've spent $4 billion in R and D in the last 10 years and $500 million in collaborative investments. I want to tell you a little bit about that this morning. I'm going to talk about two different dimensions of disruptive innovation.
The first is it's happening to the IT industry itself, and I'll talk about that. The second is how this R and D in commercialization is a bit of the issue that we were just talking about and how we are trying to make strides to make that better in Canada.
Let's talk about the IT industry itself. Analysts are pointing out quite often that Uber is the largest taxi company in the world but owns no vehicles. Facebook is the world's largest content provider, but it has no content. Alibaba is the largest retailer, but it has no inventory. Airbnb is the largest accommodation provider and has no rooms, no real estate. Each of these examples is an example of disruptive innovation. They are rapidly transforming traditional industries, and there are more examples coming.
It's important to understand that these disruptive business models, whether you're discussing Airbnb or Uber, are enabled by a specific set of technologies and increasingly, technology services that are now broadly available to both large and small businesses alike. Let me explain five.
First is cloud computing. It enables anybody with a credit card to sign on to get a full range of computing resources from infrastructure to business processes to software to applications, all consumed as a service. It means no large capital investments are required and even a very small business or someone in a garage can access world-class computing.
The second is mobile platforms. Cloud-based services now allow everything to be delivered to your handsets, to your iPads, or to your PCs anywhere you are. We've noticed that even though we're out of the PC business, it's very important to us to see the iPad has IBM on it, because we're very linked now with Apple in terms of our ability to use their very nice devices and our ability to understand the enterprise and put the two together.
The third is social networks. There are nearly two billion users of social networks creating oceans of data across a vast range of issues. Harnessing that evolving ocean of data would not only facilitate real-time feedback loops, but also anchor predictive capabilities. You'll hear us talk a little bit more about that.
Fourth, especially with the government, is security. Cybersecurity is as important in today's economy as vaults were to protecting gold and currency in years past. Whether it's protecting commercial secrets or sensitive personal information, managing and measuring access to the consumption of data and digital products is paramount to ensure value in today's data-driven economy.
The fifth is analytics. Make no mistake, we're living in a data-driven economy. A full 90% of data in the history of humans has been created in the last two years. That is continuing to grow. However, these large datasets really require understanding and deriving knowledge from them. That is really the secret. What we're talking about now is how to get those tools in front of everyone so we can get on top of this new data and knowledge economy.
I'm sure this committee will hear numerous disruptive business models and technologies, but I'll venture to say that many will be included or be enabled by secure cloud, mobile and social platforms with a strong component of big data and analytics. That's why we're investing so heavily in these areas.
It's a good segue to the second part of my discussion, world-class research, development and commercialization of disruptive technologies that's taking place in Canada.
Canada has a tremendous competitive strength, including the five technology areas I just described, and I hope to illustrate a bit of that with one of the projects we're working on.
Specifically, I'm going to focus my comments on the southern Ontario smart computing innovation platform, known as SOSCIP. It's an excellent example of how government, business and academia can collaborate to stimulate made-in-Canada disruptive technologies and the new companies and jobs that these technologies can support.
SOSCIP is a consortium between IBM Canada and seven research-intensive universities in southern Ontario—Pearl is from one—with financial contributions from the federal and provincial governments. The foundational idea behind the creation of SOSCIP was that Canada could lead the world in development of disruptive technologies as we establish a dedicated world-class technology platform to focus our efforts in areas of national and regional priority.
In turn, SOSCIP put Canada's fastest supercomputer in place, as well as the largest analytics cloud in the world. With that platform you now have the ability to tackle the toughest and most complex challenges in the areas of health care, energy, water, and cities. This initiative represents an investment of over $200 million, of which 85% came from IBM. Access to this platform is governed by the consortium members with specific focus on producing commercial outcomes. In turn, we proactively bring together some of Canada's most renowned researchers, relevant entrepreneurs, and small businesses. In fact, priority is placed on projects that are led by small business. In these cases, we can connect them directly with principal researchers. Very important in this is that the IP is open. Researchers bring in their projects and they become richer by doing so.
Since we launched in 2012, we've launched 50 game-changing projects. We've materially enhanced the skills of over 300 post-doctoral fellows that were hired for this purpose, with 88 research jobs and over 1,000 jobs that are in the network of the small businesses and researchers that are involved. We've established a pipeline of close to $2 billion in revenues for these growing SMEs just from three years ago.
One example—and I won't be able to go through the detail at length—with Synchronicity in Motion is Dr. Carolyn McGregor, who's working with SickKids in the neonatal unit and looking at all the medical devices attached to a patient. She is now able, because of real-time streaming analytics from those machines, to predict sepsis and many other ailments for those patients 48 hours in advance of anything happening to that patient; in other words, saving babies, but also saving all of the downstream effects of affected babies that take place in a very high-cost unit, but also a very high-value unit. She's taking this not only to the rest of the Canada in the cloud, but also to leading hospitals in the U.S., China, and Australia, where she's from. That's one example. It's a compelling one, but I have 49 others we could talk about and the disruptive technologies that are coming from here.
Based on these outcomes, FedDev Ontario recently announced another $20 million investment for SOSCIP 2.0 of which it unleashed another $65 million of investment from IBM. It's very exciting.
In conclusion, Canada has the capacity to produce disruptive technologies, as well as the entrepreneurs required to build companies around these new technologies. In SOSCIP, I submit, we have a proven model that can bring the critical ingredients together to facilitate such activity. In this model, we do believe there's an important role for government to set national and regional priorities, and to provide some financial incentives, including direct funding to support collaborative initiatives such as SOSCIP right across the country.
Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions.