Industry committee  Absolutely. I think networks are powerful things. Canada is a large country but also a small country in a sense. We're very spread out, and so each of our organizations follows the network model. We are in regional ecosystems from Vancouver to St. John's. In the case of our 27 centres on our network, most are focused on supporting the start-up and small to mid-sized enterprises in their regions.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  Good afternoon members of the committee. Thank you all for the invitation to appear before you today. My name is Avvey Peters. I'm the vice-president of external relations for Communitech, located in the Waterloo region, Ontario. We're an innovation hub with a mandate to help technology companies start, grow, and succeed.

Industry committee  There are 21.

Industry committee  Yes, and certainly the network has grown in the last year or so. Actually, some of our more recent additions have been in Sudbury, Ontario, and Hamilton, Ontario, communities that are not typically seen as technology centres but are starting to grow in significant digital capacity.

Industry committee  I'm not an expert in cloud computing per se, but what I can say is that we're seeing more and more of the companies we're interacting with trying to take advantage of it as a means of growing their business. I was speaking with the folks at CANARIE a week or so ago. I understand their effort is now extending beyond supporting the computing needs of post-secondary institutions.

Industry committee  I did, and the one example that a lot of cities are looking at is what has happened in Kansas City with Google's Fiber to the Home project. I think that's a result of a strong partnership between a company that had a vision to do something really interesting and a municipality that was open to it.

Industry committee  I will defer that question to the experts here.

Industry committee  I think so.

Industry committee  From our perspective, the technology companies we're working with largely reside in the ICT and digital space, and good connectivity represents a huge business opportunity for them. Every day we're seeing new areas of exploration amongst our companies. We run a digital media facility in the Waterloo region.

Industry committee  Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for the invitation to appear before you today. I represent Communitech, which is the Waterloo region technology organization. We're home to almost 1,000 companies in the region. Given the matter under consideration today, I want to share with you a perspective that goes beyond Waterloo region tech companies, one that we've gained through our national initiative, the Canadian Digital Media Network.

Industry committee  I think the experience that some of our companies have is that things take longer than they expect. Partly that's their lack of familiarity with the process. There is an administrative burden often. I think anything we can do to streamline the speed with which companies can register and defend their intellectual property is a good thing.

Industry committee  I would actually have a conversation with a bunch of CEOs of small and mid-sized companies to gather their experience. Certainly I would leverage groups like ours in order to have that dialogue, in order to seek that kind of feedback. I don't have personal experience in dealing with registering intellectual property, but certainly our companies do, and would be more than happy to share it.

Industry committee  Sure. I would absolutely agree with that. We do see M and A activity as a great exit for entrepreneurs. It helps them to start their next venture. In the best case when a Canadian start-up is acquired by a big multinational.... I'll give you another Waterloo example. About four or five years ago now, Google came to the Waterloo region to acquire a 14-person start-up called Reqwireless.

Industry committee  The other example that may be worth examining is Denmark, which has a regional model for tech transfer. Rather than every individual university having a tech transfer office, there is one in a regional context, which acts as the central area of expertise, and companies and universities alike have access to that regional expertise.