Thank you very much for that question. It's an important one that we've certainly thought about very deeply.
On the first point of there being over 100 different innovation programs, you're right. The innovation landscape is quite congested, and some call it “fragmented”. One of the purposes of BOREALIS is to help us evaluate which of that suite of government programs is most applicable to defence and security and which of them we can best leverage to do exactly what you describe: to ensure that we can drive the programming in a way that results in an operational capability at the end.
How do we do that? There are a number of steps we're taking right now to ensure that we can make that transition easier.
Number one is ensuring that we involve our Canadian Armed Forces members from the outset. What tended to happen in the past is that innovation and capability development followed what I would call “parallel tracks”. Right now, we're working very closely with our Canadian Armed Forces partners, such as Colonel Prince here, to ensure that we engage them at the very early stages of development.
One example I can give is that BOREALIS is working to support the army's Minerva initiative to ensure that our army members have access to the latest and greatest drone technology, because, as you know, drones are becoming a staple of the modern battlefield. In that way, we're working with Colonel Prince and his organization to quickly define requirements. We have launched a call for proposals called true north precision under the IDEaS program. The intent is to source Canadian-made, cost-effective, drone-based targeting and range-finding capabilities to enhance battlefield awareness. Again, the key to success is ensuring that we're in lockstep with what the army, in this case, wants and that the R and D really meets the needs of the armed forces.
The second part on the other end of the spectrum, if you will, is that we want to make sure there is a pathway to procurement. In that respect, we're working closely with our procurement authorities within the Department of National Defence, and increasingly the Defence Investment Agency as it stands up, to ensure that we can build that pathway from idea through research and development into fielding that technology. I would say we're going even further than that, thinking about potential scaling and commercialization down the road, and engaging our capital market colleagues through it and collaborating with folks like BDC to ensure there's also private capital available for our Canadian companies to scale their innovations.