Are there any areas that need to be improved? I'll answer that from a scientific perspective, and one that I hope you don't think is trite, and that is, every area can be improved. In COSIA and these oil sands companies, we take very much a continuous improvement model. Just because things are going well doesn't mean they can't go better, quicker, more inexpensively. That's the philosophy we embrace every day at COSIA.
Having said that, we have these opportunity areas and these gaps, and when we take a look at those gaps, we map them towards our current project portfolio, our 252 projects, and technically we make an assessment as to whether there is sufficient effort in our project portfolio to close the gap. If there's not, then what we'll do the next year is launch more projects.
I'll use this as an opportunity to draw attention to another concept. In some cases we have a gap, an innovation need, and the companies think that gap is particularly amenable to telling the whole world about it. We take some of the gaps and we write them up in a three-page document, including technical specifications, into what we call a challenge. That challenge is written in a way that you don't really have to understand oil sands to understand the innovation need. Then we ship that challenge basically through a series of channels around the world so that we can have, very literally, a water engineer in Israel working on a Canadian oil sands innovation challenge. So that's one thing.
The second part of your question is whether there are technological breakthroughs. What I'd say, and again, this is a bit tongue in cheek, is that as scientists and engineers, we have a hard time scheduling our breakthroughs. If it were that easy, we'd do it. Having said that, what we have done, we believe, is created the conditions to absolutely maximize the chance of success. Innovation theory shows that when you focus, when you articulate a very specific innovation need that you have, and when you put sufficient resources against it, and attract the best minds in the world to work on those challenges and problems, you get great progress. That's where we are. By taking a portfolio approach, you can actually manage a pipeline of projects, and we have a very robust innovation pipeline of projects.