There are two different routes we take in working with industry.
Some of our projects are sponsored research where the industry is providing some funding, and perhaps some funding is coming from the federal government, and there's a project that is undertaken as a result of that. Mitacs programs are another example of this form of sponsored interaction. In those cases, there's really more onus on the companies to figure out how the new ideas and approaches might fit into their product lines and then take it forward. Often we're building on existing IP that a company has and we're helping to further that to the next generation.
The other category we've been referring to today is really in the spinoff of [Technical difficulty—Editor] companies directly out of university inventions. In those cases, or in many cases, the universities, as Dr. Ghali was mentioning, are trying to incubate and accelerate along the pathway. We also have entrepreneurship programs and accelerator programs to try to incubate it.
Where companies often face a challenge is making that jump from being within the university environment to being on their own and starting to grow into large companies. In general, in Canada, we see great success with our start-up companies. They get to a certain size, but then trying to grow into a much larger company is a challenge. Part of that is some of our industrial policy, in which there are cut-offs for the sizes of companies that are able to participate in certain programs. The more we can smooth that, the more we will be able to grow our companies more successfully.