That's a million-dollar question. It's complicated. However, let me at least share a few ideas.
The biggest challenge is at the interface of research and invention, in universities and other places and industry. It's that interface between the two; there just isn't enough communication between those two parties. A lot of the research either sits in someone's drawer or gets picked up by foreign firms or something of the sort.
One thing I've been seeing that I'm quite encouraged by is this idea that instead of creating a Canadian...like an RPA or a CARPA, try to create some kind of a system similar to what they have in Israel or Finland. We've been talking about this.
Basically, it does a few things. One is that it convenes players, university researchers and industry, around big topics, ideas and problems. This is something the government can play an important role in doing, bringing people together.
Another thing it can do related to this is to connect people. If there's a firm or business that needs expertise in AI or something like that, they often don't know where to get it. They could connect that firm with university researchers in those areas.
Lastly, it's support for R and D. I mentioned in my testimony that our firms are doing almost no R and D—very little. We're last in the G7, and going down. We can reform the SR and ED system, but we can also do some direct support of R and D.
I'm encouraged by the latest things that I'm hearing. I think we need to move more in this direction.
If I can give a final plug to the University of Waterloo, I think the University of Waterloo is doing some very excellent things in terms of entrepreneurship and commercialization. We're right now trying to ramp that up by creating an office that's going to be devoted specifically to that.