Well, we're in competition. I can't give all my secrets, Madam Chair.
Through the chair, what makes a lot of sense is to understand how college applied research does work. It's to focus it on the needs of the companies in your region and the education of the students. We have what we often call a trifecta of success. You have a company with a need, students who need to be educated, and faculty or staff experts who can work together with them and solve the problems.
One thing I did when I first came to Niagara College was to focus on the areas that were important to our region. In Niagara region, we have food and beverage, agriculture, and manufacturing. I focused on those. All of a sudden, we weren't madly off in all directions. We actually focused on what was important to our region and the programs that we offer at the college because the students we hire on projects have to come from somewhere. They have to come from the programs that we have. That's one thing.
Then I would recommend going for stability. That's very important. Doing one project at a time or one little grant at a time is really tiring and it's hard to get momentum going. With NSERC and the regional development agency—in your case, it's FedDev Ontario—there is a way to actually get multi-year funding to bring the funding together when the industry partner needs you.
If I have to write a grant proposal every time, it's a six-month process. That's not the speed of business. I like to work at the speed of business, so if I can have umbrella funding that I can deploy whenever a project is judged worthy of undertaking, that really helps. Long-term funding in area one, area two and potentially area three of your expertise.... It might take three to five years to get that to happen, but that's another way.
Once you have envelope funding and repeatable success that way, you build an infrastructure that can actually get more grants, find more companies and educate more students. You need a certain critical mass.
Jeremy at Loyalist will get that done, I'm sure. He's a great colleague of mine.