Canada has a ton of these types of public-private investments in technology. Attempting to mimic the productivity of market capital investment in technology; in order to bring some sort of meritocratic process to spending the money.
But even with that structure, it never seems to produce anything interesting.
It ends up with highly beurcractic money distribution institutions such as MaRS [1] (which is high criticized in our tech scene) where money primarily goes to lawyers and high paid ex-industry executives. Aka non-entrepreneurs.
There's a big lack of accountability and money still goes to those who have friends higher up in the semi-public institutions. Aka the friends of the ex-industry executives they hire.
But even with that structure, it never seems to produce anything interesting.
It ends up with highly beurcractic money distribution institutions such as MaRS [1] (which is high criticized in our tech scene) where money primarily goes to lawyers and high paid ex-industry executives. Aka non-entrepreneurs.
There's a big lack of accountability and money still goes to those who have friends higher up in the semi-public institutions. Aka the friends of the ex-industry executives they hire.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaRS_Discovery_District