Industry committee  I went through the process as well. I came from Silicon Valley, where I started our company, and what was over there that's not here is that environment to get you ready. The minute we were talking about a start-up, all of a sudden we had all these serial entrepreneurs. These peo

Industry committee  It's pretty simple but complicated at the same time. If you look at nature, nature has figured out a way to degrade wood. If we didn't have that, we'd have wood up to our ears and above. It does that in a very slow process. It takes a long time to decay a piece of wood, and when

Industry committee  Yes, there's no doubt about it. I tell this to people all the time. I am part of the BioFuelNet program here that is funded by the federal government. My company, Amyris, went through that, actually. It was a biofuel company to begin with. Then you realize that all you are tryi

Industry committee  I need to speak to that, because I lived that. I came out of UC Berkeley, and I can tell you that everybody I worked with and everybody in the laboratories wanted to start a company. They all wanted to be entrepreneurs. Very few of them were actually thinking about being an acade

Industry committee  Maybe I could speak to that for just two seconds.

Industry committee  Maybe we haven't talked much about this, but I'll sneak it in because that's what I do. What you just heard on the electronics side, the technology side, the biology side is lagging behind a little bit. You hear about pharma taking $1 billion to develop a drug. Well, of course,

Industry committee  Maybe I could address this. I sat on a panel for Genome Canada. They actually call it “disruptive technologies”. We spent the first three months of the panel discussing what is “disruptive”. How do you justify taking taxpayers' money and risking it all the time? They're not goin

Industry committee  No, but I know what you're talking about. This is an innovation that came out of the pulp and paper industry on nanocrystalline cellulose. It's Domtar in Windsor that's doing this. It's an example of the forestry industry trying to come out of the slump they're in right now and d

Industry committee  Concordia itself, no; I know that other universities in Canada have. I think the problem with CelluForce—again, I'm not an expert in nanocrystalline cellulose, but it's a great product, a great technology—is that now they're looking for markets. They're actually producing some

Industry committee  I couldn't tell you exactly what those numbers are.

Industry committee  Maybe I could speak to that. As researchers, we often find ourselves having to partner with existing industries. A lot of our granting programs and our research funds come from partnerships with industry, so you realize that what you are ending up doing, which is not a negative

Industry committee  Risk is definitely very important. It's funny, we were discussing this in the car on the way over. A lot of our granting programs in university, and we're really talking about university systems here, are geared towards moving away from risk. Not only that, but some of us who a