First, I want to point out that the previous question was fully legitimate and I didn't feel slighted by the way it was asked. These are important questions about how to think about funding.
I just wanted to put that down.
First of all, in terms of the structure, the best model to look at is the UKRI model. The United Kingdom did some sort of capstone reorganization. They have their capstoning—I don't know if that's a verb—and then they have the equivalent of the councils below it. The councils still handle most of the investigator-driven research calls. I don't like to say that it's just “basic” science, because it's not. Let's say “basic” and “applied” research. That is closer to a disciplinary structure. Those are the verticals. That's how UKRI handles it.
As soon as it gets to mission-driven or international research, it has to go beyond the councils. One of the reasons.... Look at the innovation pipeline. I'm going to use technology-readiness levels, because that's a scale used at NASA, in the aeronautics industry and in most commercialization efforts now. Low TRLs—1 to 3—are close to discovery. They're close to basic science. That's probably going to be within the councils. As soon as something matures and gets closer to commercialization, when applicable, it gets interdisciplinary. That's because, when you're trying to deploy a product, technology or vaccine, you have to look at social, technological and health aspects. It's going to get interdisciplinary, so it has to go beyond the councils.
That doesn't mean all projects will migrate from the councils to the capstone. A lot of fundamental discovery.... We talked about Jeff Hinton. I'm going to speak for Yoshua Bengio, who is one of my professors at Université de Montréal. It was basic science for a long time. It would have stayed in the equivalent of a council. When a proof of concept becomes a product and can be deployed, it becomes mission-driven research because it has all sorts of impacts—economic, policy, security and health.
Basically, the structure is this: We still have the councils to support a lot of the investigator-driven research. It's more than an incubator, if you will. You can see it as an incubator. Then, when some projects become bigger than their disciplinary silos, they may need some interdisciplinarity. At any given time, you would have a portfolio of funding calls. Some would be investigator-driven and some would be mission-driven. They're not in competition, because they have different objectives, structures and partners.