That's a really great question. I don't think it's simply looking at technology that doesn't exist where we're going to fill a gap. I think we have to take where we have talent, where we have already developed ability, what coincides with our culture and our ability. There's no point in us developing tropical bananas or something. We have to look at what we have here in Canada. What do we have? What are our talents? What are our strengths?
Part of what we do in the Canada Foundation for Innovation is test that. We hold competitions and look at where we have strength. In 1990 before anybody knew the term “artificial intelligence”, we were funding those researchers who created what we now have in artificial intelligence. When we invested in the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, there was nothing there. It was farmers fields. Yet there were the people who had the ambition and the goal and the drive to do it.
I wouldn't have picked Waterloo—perhaps the mayor of Waterloo wouldn't like this—as a site for that, but it was brilliant, and everything has grown around it. We have to look at the people we have, the need and also the global need, and then we will find our abilities and our niche, and we will be very competitive. We've shown we can do it. In precision medicine, we are very highly ranked in the world. There's artificial intelligence. We've done quite well in quantum, but we have a lot more way to go.
We're looking at what we do for clean technologies across the country. We can build in that area, but we need to take the grassroots and bring them up. That will be our strength, because I truly believe that our strength and our best resource are the minds of the people across this country, and they will be the key.