CANADA – Canada’s mediocre innovation performance calls for a broader policy approach, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute.
In Innovation Policy in Canada: A Holistic Approach, author Daniel Schwanen examines the innovation challenges that Canada faces and suggests an integrated approach to support innovation in the broader economy.
Canada is widely considered to be an innovation under-achiever, despite decades-long attempts to address this gap. “The key unmet challenge of Canadian innovation policy today is ensuring the best possible environment for commercializing ideas,” Schwanen argues. “It is time to move beyond the ‘spray and pray’ approach to a more coherent one.”
According to the new report, a successful innovation policy would build on Canada’s existing advantages. It would pay attention to the multitude of regulatory and other practices that result in governments blocking innovation with one hand, while promoting it with the other.
“While the federal government’s superclusters initiative is a step in the right direction, it makes little sense to talk about building a nation of innovators while so many barriers to innovation-based economic activity remain in Canada” says Schwanen.
To remove barriers to innovation in Canada, Schwanen suggests an integrated approach based on four pillars:
- A greater focus on research and educational excellence, and on deploying and attracting related talent and skills, including those beyond scientific and engineering skills, such as marketing and business;
- A suite of trade, fiscal, regulatory and other policies and approaches to:
- Foster entrepreneurship and economic activity based on existing talent, skills, and research;
- Facilitate the risk-taking – and acceptance of risk-taking – that such activities entail;
- Remove unnecessary barriers to these activities.
- Innovation in the delivery of public services themselves; and
- A more goals-oriented approach to government support for business innovation that nevertheless relies more on market and other arm’s length mechanisms, as well as international collaboration in some areas, to achieve desired goals.
“The ultimate motivation for wanting to improve Canada’s innovation performance is simple – to improve Canadians’ overall standard of living,” Schwanen concludes.
