That's a very good question, because a billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but there are a lot of firms and a lot of needs out there and we certainly don't want to spread ourselves so darned thin that we're not accomplishing the impact that we want. And we certainly don't want to substitute ourselves for what private firms ought to be doing.
I will look a bit at the risks that we're trying to address and try to summarize them in maybe four buckets. The first is technology risk. This is where firms should be driving this effort, but it's where market failure tends to occur, as I referenced earlier. Every government on this planet is providing some assistance to R and D, whether it's through tax measures or direct support, in conjunction with what the firms are trying to advance.
Then there is a second risk around business risk. As the name suggests, it's what a company would tend to bear in terms of whether or not the product is deemed to be safe or accomplishing the mission it is meant to do. There, one would expect that the companies would own much of that risk of whether the particular product would meet the marketplace's needs.
The third risk, which is not insignificant in this case, is the policy risk. It is both a positive and a negative risk. I can use the example of climate change. Over the course of the past year, and a bit in Canada and globally, there certainly has been a change in the policy landscape that has made the adoption of these clean technologies easier, whether through regulations, carbon pricing, or other measures that we are currently discussing. In this case, the policy environment became more supportive. But we could imagine circumstances whereby that policy risk would change toward the negative and make it less attractive or less easy for companies to advance their technology.
I don't know if this describes it in a useful, clear enough fashion, but that's how we tend to frame, at the macro level, the risks out there and who would tend to bear them.