Editorial - 27-20

Industry Canada's forthcoming update of the 2007 S&T Strategy provides an ideal opportunity to address the policies underlying the nation's anemic innovation performance. A foresight report released for limited circulation last year suggests there's much work to do.

While we remain a prosperous nation, rapid advances in technology and the emergence of new global innovation powerhouses pose grave dangers that could derail the economy and see Canada revert to the status of a re-developing nation.

It doesn't have to be this way. Canada's resource- and knowledge-based economies can be developed in tandem, cross-fertilizing one another and creating vast new sources of revenue generation.

A good place to start is the work of Dr Richard Hawkins, who was the lead author of a brief yet potent 10-point prescription for effective innovation policy and implementation (R$, October 10/13).

Hawkins argues persuasively that Canada's so-called resource curse can serve as the basis for an export-based technological revolution in this country.

Such a sea change from the status quo requires support for both basic research and innovation — not the either/or approach now being pursued by Ottawa. And it requires champions throughout the innovation ecosystem tied together by a holistic policy approach to identifying, building and exploiting Canada's research strengths.

Canada doesn't have to be a technological backwater but unless we craft policies and programs that energize and enable innovators to do their best, that may be our long-term fate.