Yes, if I could, I'll answer this from the point of view of an example. If you look at our submission, one of the other networks we were involved with was the Mechanical Wood-Pulps Network. We have an example there of a technology that came out of the network that was picked up by an entrepreneur. In fact, he built his whole company around it, essentially.
So you have to have somebody who has some vision, somebody who understands something about the marketplace and knows how to sell into this market. At the same time, there has to be something on the other side. In other words, you're transferring technology from the university to industry.
Well, we did some very different things. Instead of providing him with only a report or a paper, we actually moved people into his facilities, and they worked very closely with his engineers. So while we were leading the research phase, he was leading the technology development and commercialization, and we were supporting him on-site. And he went from having a very small company with 12 employees to having something in the order of 35 or 40 employees, and he was the leading manufacturer of this kind of equipment. He built several other unique pieces of equipment at a later date. He continued, then, investing back into research at the universities and taking advantage of all the programs that were available to him, supported by provincial and federal governments.
So that's the example. How you make entrepreneurs is a much more difficult question. One of the things we're doing in our network is bringing in some experts who understand entrepreneurship, who have studied it at university, and who have firsthand experience with it, and we're teaching it to our graduating scientists and engineers. Maybe one of them will take that up and will become the next generation of entrepreneurs. But you have to be able to teach it.
Given my experience over the last 30 years--I came out of a Canadian university, did graduate work, worked in industry--I think the deficiency probably was that nobody ever exposed me to that while I was at university. And I would suggest that a course in that might be a useful requirement to have. Out of that you may have your next generation of entrepreneurs.