This is pretty close to my heart; I work on this quite a bit.
It's an ecosystem. If you unpack it there are different dimensions in the ecosystem, and part of it is cultural. I hate to say this, in a way, but part of it is how we have grown up, how we've approached the academic environment. We are number one in the OECD in publicly funded R and D because we spend a lot of money in the university environment. We have some very good academics who work there. It's not part of their natural inclination to take their products to market. It's not driven in that way.
I spent the first four years of my career in Silicon Valley, and you see a completely different culture and approach to risk and technology. University professors at Stanford, Berkeley, and places like that think of doing the research, but they also think about how to commercialize it and make money from it. So part of that is culture. You have to unpack that. It changes with time. It changes with the type of people. It changes with the education system, with business schools. There are a variety of things involved.
The second area that is really important in a research and development space is money, as we know. Venture capital in Canada has essentially disappeared. A real issue we have to face, as an economy, is how we bring money into that particular space. Private venture capital is really struggling.
There are ways we've been looking at doing this. We're looking at ways we can encourage more venture capital from outside the country to support the companies, whether that is the U.S. or European or Asian foreign venture capital.
At the end of the day--and again, it's the nature of our country--there is value in clusters. If you take a look at Toronto and the hospital system there, we're getting some wonderful technology coming out of that. There is wonderful technology in Montreal, in the digital media space, because of the cluster advantage. It is the same thing in Vancouver. We have those clusters. We have to be able to connect them better. As part of what we do from the investment attraction perspective, we have to be able to say what's happening in Canada, why it's happening, and to support that cluster. Because it's not just the university ecosystem; it's the private sector ecosystem as well as the support system that goes with it. These are the types of things we are trying to look at.
To follow up on Mr. Guimond's question, it is how we connect internationally. We cannot do it alone in this environment today. You have to develop those partnerships globally to build those products. You can't take something from the workbench to a finished product to the market now. One company can't do that by itself. They have to be able to connect to the larger ecosystem.