Good morning.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present here.
I come from a different background from the rest of my peers because I've worked in technology consulting for a number of years. In fact, sitting right here is the person who trained me initially. After that, I worked in technology commercialization with one of the largest networks in southern Ontario.
About a decade ago there was a mindset of putting consortiums together for technology commercialization. There was an advantage to those, because they allowed the pooling of resources across some of these universities and colleges that have limited resources, and they facilitated contact between colleges and universities.
The limitation was the lack of compatibility. There were bottlenecks because each of these institutions had 50- or 60-year-old policies that they were trying to change. Industry, especially looking at Ontario where there are primarily small and medium-sized enterprises, doesn't have that kind of bandwidth to wait for the universities and colleges to go ahead with pooling all the agreements.
The second thing is that some of the institutions have inventor-owned and others institution-owned policies. I've worked with both of those, inventor as well as institution. Where it's inventor-owned, they have more of an entrepreneurship mindset, because they go and talk with venture capitalists to see how a framework can be put together to test that initial prototype.
I've travelled across the world, in the U.S. as well as doing commercialization work in India, Southeast Asia, Singapore, and China. In Canada we can have the best technology, but our market is limited. We are great people, but we are only 30 million. Countries like India and Singapore have a lot in common with the Canadian system because the legal systems are based on British common law, so the ease of doing business is really there.
I have some successful examples where Canadian technologies have been commercialized in joint partnerships with companies in China and India. That's a good model to look at, where there are economies of scale due to the size of their population but they don't have that initial IP that's being developed at colleges and universities in Canada.
The other thing is that one needs specific milestones, because the researchers have a mindset of having that fund available, whether it's from the Tri-Council or an industry partner. After that, they fall through in terms of the specific milestones that should be met to get that initial product to market.
I've done several projects with institutions in the U.S. It's interesting because in Canada, researchers mostly get paid for the whole 12 months, whereas in a number of institutions in the U.S., academic researchers are paid for eight months. For four months they are forced to think outside the box and see how they can come up with more ideas. There is closer collaboration with industry over there. That may be another model one can explore here.
It's interesting, because in all the years that I was in technology commercialization, one technology that was developed by a group of mechanical engineers was for curling. There had been no innovation in that industry for over 20 years. Curling is a sport that is very popular across Canada. They came up with a new design for a broom. We worked out the business model, and there are over a million curlers across Canada. Each of these brooms is sold for anywhere between $30 and $35, so it's an annual recurring market of $30 million.
There are a number of these small technologies, especially coming from some of the colleges, but what is required is an incentive for industry. NSERC has a program called Idea to Innovation, but it's significantly underutilized because that program and Tri-Council are two silos that don't talk to each other.
Thank you.