It's a very good question, and thank you very much for that. Particularly in your riding in Markham, you see a lot of these ICT companies that are scaling up and growing. From our perspective as a government, there are really three areas of focus for an innovation and skills plan. The first one I alluded to in my remarks is talent and people. This is about promoting lifelong learning. It's really critical; if you talk to any company, the first issue they talk about is talent and people. It's an issue that not only Canadians talk about, but if you look internationally as well, it's the number one issue. This is why so many companies are investing in Canada. That's why we have made significant investments in education, in training, and in lifelong learning as part of our innovation skills budget.
The second area is the focus on technology and technology adoption. Compared to our U.S. peers, we are falling behind, particularly in the SME sector. We are focusing on many initiatives to promote more technology adoption and are making big bets on certain technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and digital. These are horizontal platforms that have enormous opportunities to impact very many different sectors. That's why we are focused on that through research funding and commercialization.
The third pillar you alluded to in this innovation and skills plan is really about scaling up companies. We are a start-up nation; we're really good at starting up companies. You and I may recollect that during our Ryerson days, the digital media zone, DMZ, at Ryerson University was a good incubator for starting up companies and creating the opportunity for individuals to bring their ideas to market, but now the question is how we help them to scale up and grow.
One of the initiatives I want to highlight is innovative solutions Canada. This is a procurement initiative by the federal government to be a marquee customer, to say that we're willing to be a marquee customer, especially for companies when they go abroad. Often they're asked whether they do business with the Government of Canada. If they say yes, that opens up many more doors. We want to use government's purchasing power. We spend $18 billion on procurement. If you take away defence, for example, we still spend $9 billion on goods and services, so we have enormous opportunity exclusively at the federal level to support Canadian companies that are scaling up.
Another initiative is superclusters. One of the key features of this is not simply about the large anchor firms, but really about the supply chain and the small businesses that want to scale up and grow. When they work with large companies, they get the mentorship, the know-how. They understand how to build capacity internally. That knowledge transfer, that supply chain integration between the large and small firms is another example of scaling up. We're really focusing on areas of high growth. That's why we identified in a very strategic way six areas of growth. We have chairs for those six strategy tables.
Really, that's the government's focus. It's first on people, then on technology, and then on making sure companies can actually scale up through our being a marquee customer and our connecting them with large firms. That's our approach when it comes to scaling up companies.