I will try to answer in a general way. Mr. Nightingale may have specific examples to give you later.
In the area of commercialization, our role is to support companies that are active and want to do commercialization, such as the industrial research assistance program, IRAP, which I mentioned earlier. So we'll support them financially, but we'll also network and direct them to the appropriate resources. We will support them by scaling up, which is very important. You mentioned the valley of death. You have to move from something that works in the laboratory 80% of the time in small quantities to something that will be sold and bought. This is a critical step, and it is in this sense that the IRAP program will be useful. For our part, we will be doing demonstrations.
It is essential for us to have key players around the table throughout the value chain, so that small businesses understand the challenges of large companies and it is possible to establish connections. In our opinion, our role is very much about making connections between large and small so that everything goes faster.
The first component of NRC's formal mandate is to develop new knowledge. The ones we develop using our budgets, the government's budget, take the form of publications, but also patents. We have several thousand patents that we are trying to commercialize by making them available to Canadian companies.
