Mr. Chair, I'd be pleased to. First of all, let me just step back a minute and point out that even the universities do a great deal of applied research. They don't just do discovery-based fundamental research. It's this dynamic between discovery and innovation that we are reinforcing.
Sixty-five per cent of the faculty in universities were hired in the last decade. This has given rise to a very different workforce. It's a highly entrepreneurial workforce, and they are very keen to partner with industry. Twenty-seven per cent of our faculty partner with industry at the moment. We don't divide this up into discovery only and applied research only.
The colleges and polytechnics offer a much more ready presence with industry to solve their problems immediately. The universities, for example, may work on the next generation battery technology, but they may work in concert with a college in looking at new ways of generating and mining lithium.
I think it's the marriage of those two expertises and the synergy that we try to exploit. We are the convenor. We bring those partners together. We try not to distinguish and differentiate so much between the fundamental and the applied. We recognize that there's a spectrum of different types of research, and we try to get the best of the best working together.