Finance committee  In the industry, we did a survey of a lot of the companies in our FINTRAC portfolio on what was going on with SDTC. Everybody is supportive of the intention behind what the investments need to be. Everybody is also supportive of making sure that it's run in a conflict-free way that doesn't get in the way of delivering the benefits that it's intended to do.

Finance committee  Having an IP culture is a fundamental prerequisite for the commercialization phase of it. I do believe that Canada needs to do more, but it's not necessarily educating in the start-up world. In the science start-up world that I deal with, the majority of our companies come to MaRS with their patent strategies and IP already in place.

Finance committee  Yes, I agree one hundred per cent that we should be giving those incentives. I think there's an “and” to that: We actually don't have enough Canadian business innovators to match all of our R and D researchers to. There's a program by the CPA whereby they're training financial professionals on how to deal with high-growth situations.

Finance committee  That's a big question. Thank you very much for it. When you think of our natural tendency as a culture in Canada, we are risk averse. We covet our banking system, which is very risk averse in a lot of ways. The terms in the system for providing loans to small business entrepreneurs to get them the funding and to get from the research to....

Finance committee  Good afternoon. I apologize. What I sent is a lot longer than what I'm going to talk about. In my practice, I was over five minutes, so it might not be great for the translation. Thank you very much for having me today. As the chair indicated, I'm Krista Jones, and I'm the chief delivery officer for MaRS Discovery District, which is North America's largest innovation hub.

Science and Research committee  I think we actually have a lot of proposals on the table around what to do to protect our IP. I don't think I have anything new to add to a lot of the testimony that has already occurred in this committee.

Science and Research committee  Venture capital is an essential part of this ecosystem. I heard comments earlier about private industry and what role private players have. We don't exist without venture capital, and we know that in our high-growth industries, close to 70% of the capital that gets invested in our companies comes from foreign sources.

Science and Research committee  The key to all of this is people. You need people who have done it before in the industries that we're looking to support.

Science and Research committee  Thank you very much for that question. The majority of global patents are held in the large global multinationals or in the advanced industries. What we don't have in Canada is global foreign multinationals in advanced industries that are headquartered here. For us to actually increase our percentage ownership in global IP, we need to grow big companies.

Science and Research committee  I think multiple complex environments end up in the value chain around this entity. I think it is about making sure that we understand the full ecosystem of the innovations that are occurring. Yes, I think there is the need for us to look after the homegrown IP that surrounds an entity like an EV plant that Volkswagen is putting in Canada.

Science and Research committee  Regarding the experience to date with the ElevateIP, since it hasn't been rolled out, we can't comment as to how it's going to work in practice. We're working closely with the recipients of the grant to make sure that we have the pathways to get their great work, as well as the work of the other IP-based organizations that have been funded, into the hands of the entrepreneurs who need them.

Science and Research committee  Thank you. When we look at procurement, we see it's deep and specific and that there are different procurement needs, depending on the different sectors of the advanced industry you're looking at. We can look at some of the examples. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the work we're doing on clean tech.

Science and Research committee  I think improving the overall policy is a big question. What I'd rather do is comment on a couple of really specific suggestions that we think could help add to what is already under way. One of them is that right now we really need to look at the risk capital that's available in the ecosystem to grow deep IP-based companies.

Science and Research committee  Is it appropriate? That's a tough question for somebody with my vantage point to answer. What is appropriate, I think, is that we incentivize. There are various means of providing that incentive so that for people who invest in Canada, ourselves as well as foreign companies, there is an incentive to actually buy Canadian and help these companies that are growing.

Science and Research committee  As I said—