If we're talking about the economy, the most important role over at the NRC that's very direct and that we can measure is the support we provide to small and medium-sized businesses. I mentioned that in my opening comments—the 10,000 companies we help every year. The question is this: What happens to them when they receive their help? How do they follow up?
We have strong KPIs to track what goes on. We have a 33% growth rate of the companies we work with. Over the last year, there was 13% growth of employment. That is an area that has recently trended down. I think that reflects some of the uncertainties and economic questions that you've raised. Essentially, companies are working on internal work, but they are not necessarily expanding their workforce. It's an area where we want to see opportunity at the growth and employment levels in the companies we work with. We track it very closely. In fact, you can look at it over a long period of time and see what it is that IRAP achieves.
The other statistic that's important is that the companies that IRAP supports are, more or less, 80% of the companies that raise the greatest equity, subsequent even to working with us. The question is whether we are choosing wisely whom to work with. I believe we have pretty strong evidence that we are. Those companies scale, become more significant, add more employment and become real exporters for Canada. We have to build from small businesses to get there. Those are the companies that will move the needle on the productivity that we're looking for in the long run.
We have to focus on the day-to-day in dealing with those companies and doing our job well in deploying the funds we have. Whether that all adds up at the global level to high productivity.... I think we're contributing, but there are a lot of other things that have to go well.