Throughout my career in Sudbury and elsewhere, I've been involved in research projects, continuously in Sudbury. The fact is that we have 30 years of research in the Sudbury basin on our deep mines, and very little of that has actually moved off into industry to be commercialized. It's because we don't have the mechanisms. It's not just finishing up with the research report, and then somehow it magically becomes a product. It doesn't. You go from a bench scale, as Peter Hollings described this morning, to pilot scale, to operational scale, to full-scale field trial, then to commercialization of that field-trial result.
The money that you have to spend to make those things happen, especially in a heavy industry like mining, is getting bigger and bigger all the time. One of the issues for us is the funding ratios for government funds versus industry funds. Right now it's dollar to dollar. You can see that the cost of innovation is very much larger when you move up through building physical machines and plants to do things more efficiently. That's much more expensive than large-scale trials and academic studies, yet the ratio we have to work with is still 1:1, exactly the same as for research.
Innovation is much more costly and much more risky than research, but the funding mechanisms are the same. You're essentially smothering or strangling innovation. Once excellent research has been done, it can't then move through the system to get to industry with the current format.