Yes, 100%, Canada's research and innovation strategy is global philanthropy. It's how we give to foreign countries. The problem is that we don't have a policy where the individual researcher or university has to make decisions that benefit Canada economically where the economy is at hand. That's not to say all research is about commercialization. It naturally flows to the more high-profile or sophisticated partner. Thus, Canada continues to lose its scale.
Again, the answer is some kind of expert centralized agency or Crown corporation that does this. Think of the Fraunhofer institute. It has 80 research institutes around Germany, 30,000 employees and one centralized expert tech transfer centre that manages this for everybody. I chaired a panel in Ontario on intellectual property. Ontario alone—a small fraction of the size of Fraunhofer's research—has over 30 tech transfer offices. It's fragmented, non-coordinated, non-expert and non-scale.
It's a structural problem of inattention.