I'll talk mostly about the experience we have at Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, because we're working within the cluster structure. Our focus is commercialization, so we basically work directly with early-stage companies to try to move them through the valley of death to successful commercialization. I think that segment of working with those early-stage companies and helping them to succeed in Canada is really very important.
I came out of the traditional petrochemical industry. I worked for Polysar, Bayer, and Lanxess over my career. What I learned from my career working for a multinational that was not Canadian-based is that multinationals that aren't Canadian-based don't really have a long-term vision about Canada. We're basically a business entity for them.
If we're really going to be successful in creating businesses in Canada, we need to build and strengthen our own Canadian-based companies. We have a few large Canadian multinationals, but we don't have enough. Developing and supporting innovation in early-stage companies that have developed their technologies through Canadian universities, or wherever it came from, through all these awards from NSERC and the various innovation and support structures we have in Canada, is really very important. The challenge we have, though, is a lot of those technologies get developed, and then, ultimately, funding comes from somewhere in the United States, and then they get pulled away and commercialized elsewhere.
It's really very important that we put a big focus on commercializing technologies in Canada and having the mechanisms in place to support the commercialization. I focus that differently from innovation, because we are really good at innovation. In commercializing, there are so many aspects to it that can cause you to fail. Finding ways to deal with those pieces of commercialization that these companies have to overcome is very, very important.