Thank you for the question.
To be honest, the program has grown slowly but surely since it was established in 2005. When we first began, we had a very moderate amount of money. It was $15 million. Last year we had $30 million. This coming year we'll have $40 million. Of course, part of our review was to ask what the right amount of money is.
We're working with our colleagues in ISED. We're working with NRC and seeing what the opportunities in Canada are more broadly.
I guess my comment comes down to looking at the American model. The advantage of the American model is—and I'm just reading back into it 35 or 40 years ago—that when they looked at spending, they recognized the need to align R and D to economic output or commercialization. They're not afraid of failure. You cannot do innovation without having failure. The Americans have lots of it, but they also have huge successes.
For example, one of their programs that began in SBIR was a very small company called Qualcomm. They began with an SBIR grant, and today they have a capital value of $140 billion in the marketplace, a global leader.
Out of these programs there are many that don't succeed, that don't get past phase one. Some go through phase two. The great opportunity in the American model is that once they get to phase two, that good or service can then be purchased without any further competitive process by U.S. government departments, which means it becomes hugely attractive both for the company or the department that sponsored them, but also it then allows them to leverage economically both in the United States and globally.
It attracts partners because they're at the point of commercialization. Angel investors come in and say, “Okay, the risk is down.” We're looking at these kind of things to see how we can advance this in Canada.