Yes. It is usually people who work together rather that institutions working together.
Most of the time it's this researcher who knows he or she wants to solve this problem or create new knowledge and then needs the other person at the other place.
I'm not a big fan of shotgun weddings as it sometimes happens that funding agencies want to force this, but having the availability of working together is great. An example of that is with FedDev Ontario, our regional economic development agency in southwest Ontario. We had a project from Niagara College, Sheridan College, and Mohawk College called SONAMI, the Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation. We were putting ourselves up for FedDev, saying we were going to help SMEs in advanced manufacturing and all these technologies.
The folks at McMaster University also had a proposal in front of them and in the end they came to me and said, Marc, we really like some of what McMaster is putting forward, but not all of it, so could you take that bit and make it part of your project and then we'll fund you—it wasn't said quite like that—and it was great. We've had a great collaboration with McMaster University on advanced manufacturing, and these things happen all the time. Universities do come to us and we do go to them.
If I can be candid, often universities don't necessarily know what colleges can do, so they don't automatically have as a reflex, I need this done, where am I going to get it? I'll go to a college.