The funding is there. It's just that demand so far outstrips supply that it's quite frustrating for our centres and the companies they support. It's more frustrating for the companies on wait-lists. We surveyed the centres recently, and we're looking at 850 companies on the wait-list. The average wait is 11 weeks for a spot to open up and then get that support, with 2,800 person-days of support identified as being our service to these companies.
The demand is there. Canadian companies want to innovate, but just like a hockey team on the ice, it can't be six against one. They need help. We are those objective innovation intermediaries that can help them advance their game-changing idea from something scribbled on a napkin to a product hanging on store shelves. It's just that the current way of funding things seems skewed a little bit more towards basic and discovery research and not so much towards the later ends of experimental development and commercialization.
If you look at the granting councils, I believe you'll see that their budget is in the neighbourhood of $3 billion a year, and it's focused on incredible basic discovery research, as I said. Then you look at a program like the National Research Council's industrial research assistance program. It has “industrial research” in its name, and I believe it's around $350 million a year. We have a 10-to-one imbalance of inputs going in the basic side and then commercialization coming out the other end.