I would say there are multiple entities. We talked about IRAP and certainly the technology access centres and so forth.
A lot of this will depend on the ability of a business or a company to, in the first place, identify opportunity. That's partly an educational activity, and it's partly a selling job that universities and colleges need to do. It's what I used to do; I'd just go visit.
The structures for that are more difficult. In terms of the early access or collaborative research activity, there is quite a bit of that in Canada already, about a billion dollars' worth. What people are doing now at the Montreal Neurological Institute and particularly at the Structural Genomics Consortium in Toronto is different. They are bringing companies into the research process—particularly the Structural Genomics Consortium—at a very early stage, and they are paying to have access so they can be at the table when discoveries are made and then collaborate work with the researchers and inventors to move those to market.
All that early stage, research is never lost because it's all made public. It's all out there as opposed to research that starts in a company lab or in a company facility where it's all protected to the very bitter end. Companies have the opportunity to save a lot of money. They don't have to invest in a lot of early-stage development. They can pick up a technology at the point where they can use it and then protect it, and then off they go, and everybody's happy. That's the exception right now. If I were a vice-president of research these days in Canada, creating more of those would be my objective.
You are currently up against a cultural wall that would render that fairly difficult, in part because of the way researchers approach this, in part because of the way companies approach the exercise, and in part because of the way tech transfer offices manage that process. I'm pretty convinced, though, from having a look at this, that it make sense in that model.