I have been a fan of the concept of an XPRIZE, and I've talked about it in the past.
When you, as a government, select certain organizations—such as FPInnovations, which is a great forest product innovations organization—I think the challenge is that if all the funding goes to one or two organizations, you don't get the most out of the opportunity around innovation.
Instead, what I think would be very compelling as a mission is if there was a large prize offered every year—Sweden does this—that was made available for wood innovation in any form and was handed out only to a Canadian resident. It may be some innovation on the technical fabrication side. It may be on the building side. It may be on the marketability side.
That would do a couple of things. For every dollar you invested as a government, you would get 100 times the number of people chasing that money. You would be setting an ambition that we are an innovative country and that we are going to inspire innovation by giving everybody access to it. It's a drop in the bucket as an investment for the government, which in turn would give you a tenfold or a hundredfold return. One of the most important things is that it would attract the best of the best from around the world to say, “Wow, Canada has this. Maybe I will move to Canada. Maybe I will emigrate to Canada because I am a wood innovation expert who wants to contribute to the Canadian system, and they are going to give me this opportunity.”
I think that would be a wonderful way to spend our money.
