Absolutely, and I think it's particularly difficult for the forest sector, because a lot of these manufacturing technologies need to go through a scale-up, and before that a lot of risk has to be taken out before they can move up. Some of the projects ongoing in Canada right now, for example, led by FPInnovations, have done really well, but a tremendous amount of work by a team of researchers went into that before they could move to this stage.
If you approach forest product companies and ask if they can put some cash forward to allow these early-stage, high-risk ideas to move forward a bit, you'll find it's difficult, given their current economic situation. They would like to have something ready so they can adopt it. They want to know the exact cost structure and the revenue, how many dollars it's going to make.
I think that's what I'm referring to as the gaps in this kind of innovation value chain, as I would call it. We have a lot of ideas, and there may be early stage, small scale, or maybe larger scale at universities, yet they don't have a proper way of moving out of the university labs to the stage where there can be uptake.