Absolutely, yes.
I think we've had an approach that was a little bit more of what I would call “spray and pray” in terms of funding research That's changing a bit, but it's almost that we fund the activity rather than paying attention to the outcome and how Canadians can benefit from it.
Don't get me wrong: we're already doing a lot of things. This committee has heard about better protection for IP, upscaling business leaders, which are hugely important. It's often not appreciated that successful U.S. business leaders, for example, tend to have a higher degree of education than our Canadian business leaders. All these sorts of soft aspects to commercialization really come into play in entrepreneurship and so on.
But there are some hard factors, as well. Canada is not doing well at all in terms of capital investment. We know that capital investment is almost in symbiosis with commercialization and innovation. The two work together. It's a very bad symptom if we don't have investment in this country. We should look at, of course, tax rates. We should look maybe at depreciation rates for capital. All these things, although they're general policies, will contribute to the use of IP in this country and to its commercialization in this country.
We have a bit of a problem, I think, with some of these soft skills, entrepreneurship, but we're also not really rewarding investment, as well as the commercialization of IP, as much as I think other countries are doing.