Thank you for that question.
One of the important things to do is to make sure all of our researchers have access to knowledge about what intellectual property is. It's not just patents. It can be trade secrets. It can be other forms. Sometimes individuals don't know how they might actually take forward some of the ideas they have that could actually find their way into commercialization streams. There's a big part to education.
There's also a need to ensure that we're connecting the right people within our communities and educating the broad spectrum of people needed to take something from being an idea into being a product.
One place where things perhaps fall apart a little bit in Canada is that innovation gap that is often spoken about. If you're developing a new chemical process, this might be the funding to do something at scale, but not at production scale. It's taking it from what happens at a lab bench into something a little bit bigger in some sort of plant where you might be able to try something more at scale.
There are a number of places where we could fund different kinds of infrastructure to help in that translation. We could also fund the kinds of people you need to develop skills that are not just the research side of the skills, but the skills for seeing what the product could be out of that research, doing the product fit, building out the marketing and expertise in terms of running a company.
It's difficult to put all the pieces together within the ecosystem. We're seeing various organizations, like the Creative Destruction Lab, help in that kind of translation by having mentors available for young project teams to understand what that transition might look like.
There are various items within the ecosystem that we might be able to fund to help more of our research ideas find their way into commercialization.