Mr. Chair, I referred in my introduction to the capacity that the region has and also the fact that it has the highest concentration of colleges and universities. There are 35 colleges and universities in southern Ontario as well as a number of research institutions.
Through the investing in commercialization partnerships, the objective and the goal is to try to leverage that capacity in order to support the innovation ecosystem and to support the development of partnerships with the private sector. Through that program we're trying to leverage those partnerships but also to ensure that they are focused on commercialization outcomes.
The idea is to have those public-private sector partnerships to make sure that some of the challenges and opportunities that the private sector is facing are identified and that the capacity of the universities or the colleges is leveraged in order to find solutions to their challenges.
I'll give two examples. In January the Prime Minister announced funding of $12 million for the Southern Ontario Water Consortium. It's a $12 million contribution for a consortium of 11 universities and one college, all of which have capacity in water-related technology, research, and development. The idea is to have that consortium of universities and colleges partner and complement their capacity; and in return they will partner with various small and medium-sized enterprises across the region in order to accelerate or prototype or bring to markets water-related technologies.
Each university or college that is part of the partnership has its own strength, which could be, for example, water treatment or water filtration. They're trying to complement one another as opposed to competing in order to leverage their capacity.
In return, this allows the small and medium-sized enterprises to partner with those universities, to partner with those researchers in order to bring to market their products or their services more quickly. In return they will, for example, partner with municipalities in the region in order to do some prototyping on testing of the technologies. If they are successful, they can use those outcomes to more easily export their products or their services globally.
The other example is the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform. Some of you may have heard of it, it's called SOSCIP. It's a consortium of 14 universities across the region again in partnership with IBM and also with a number of small and medium-sized enterprises. The idea is to leverage essentially the digital infrastructure or the digital technologies, big data, and high performance computing that IBM has to offer but also that the universities have access to in order to leverage big data analytics to accelerate commercialization of products and services again.
In that case, last year the agency provided $20 million to support the platform. They have four areas of specialization. Three of these are mining, advanced manufacturing, and cybersecurity. The idea, again, is to spur and to create those partnerships leveraging any comparative advantages to accelerate commercialization and to provide those companies with the first mover's advantage, because it's really important for them to bring those products and services to market as soon and as quickly as possible in order to beat the competition.