Feds ready to partner with provinces and industry on pan-Canadian innovation strategy

R$ Conference

By Debbie Lawes

Canada's innovation ecosystem is about to get a lot cozier, and according to the experts who spoke at this year's RE$EARCH MONEY conference, that's not only a good thing — it's also long overdue. The new Liberal government is embarking on an ambitious plan over the coming months to reassess and redesign the country's innovation strategy. This includes looking at ways to better consolidate and streamline business support programs between all levels of government and other stakeholders; clear goals on what we want to achieve as a country; and 21st Century metrics for measuring success.

"It's not often you have an opportunity to take stock of all your policy levers," says Frank Des Rosiers, assistant DM, Innovation & Energy Technology, Natural Resources Canada.

Tom Jenkins, board chair of OpenText Corp, said the stars have finally aligned for bringing all stakeholders together to define and develop a cohesive, pan-Canadian action plan for innovation that makes homegrown companies more globally competitive and shrinks our chronic productivity gap with the United States.

"We have a new (federal) government. Actually we have several new governments across the country, where there's an opportunity for renewed thinking, where some ideas that perhaps couldn't be dealt with prior can be dealt with now," Jenkins told delegates in Ottawa April 6.

"We've been using the term alignment," added Des Rosiers, "and this is something the provinces have been seeking from the federal government."

This new way of thinking is already happening outside of government. Jenkins co-chairs the recently formed Business Higher Education Roundtable, a group of 29 leading executives from the private sector, universities, colleges and polytechnics focused on improving career prospects for graduates and strengthening research and innovation linkages between large firms and institutions.

During a panel discussion on federal support for innovation, Marc Fortin, former ADM research at Agriculture and AgriFood Canada, said taking a multi stakeholder approach to developing and funding innovation programs—as opposed to a broad, horizontal federal policy—is finding success in the agricultural sector. The federal, provincial and territorial governments committed $3 billion over five years (2013-18) to the Growing Forward policy framework and worked with industry to co-develop strategies on how to best invest that money to support innovation, competitiveness, and market development.

He said the research granting councils also have a good track record in directing limited funds to excellent research by using peer review to select winning applications.

"We're not talking about government or a single bureaucrat picking winners. We need to bring in the ecosystem to work with us to understand the opportunities. It's up to the ecosystem to work together and identify what's going to be done," says Fortin, now assistant DM, Science & Technology at the Department of National Defence and CEO of Defence R&D Canada.

Lawrence Hanson, the Innovation department's assistant DM, Science & Innovation Sector, says the government is committed at the most senior levels to a broad-based consultation process over the coming months. He noted that the $800 million for innovation networks and clusters in the recent federal Budget "wasn't committed to any specific programs at this point", providing an opportunity to use some of that money to hold consultations prior to the 2017 Budget.

That funding envelop will also be used to develop a Canadian Cluster Mapping Portal to compare regional cluster information across and within Canada, the US and Mexico. The new website will include open data on regional economic strengths, business needs and academic capabilities to help guide government policy and business decisions. The website will be similar to the US Cluster Mapping and Registry project which allows anyone to visualize economic clusters across the country and see how well, or not so well, an area's economy is performing.

Hanson said on a macro level Canada's industrial strengths are well known, including aerospace, ICT, life sciences and energy. But "we need to deepen our understanding of where those strengths are and what we can lever … by working with the private sector, the provinces and territories who understand where their capacities are."

That dearth of credible, timely and relevant data on Canada's innovation performance could be one of the government's biggest challenges. David Watters, CEO of Global Advantage Consulting, noted that Statistics Canada no longer tracks key data within the innovation ecosystem and the government's Survey of Innovation and Business Strategy excludes 87% of businesses.

As well, traditional technology innovation metrics such as dollars invested, publications, patents, licences, start-ups, highly qualified people and venture capital investment fall short of capturing the full impact of a complex interconnected ecosystem. Hanson said his department would like to see numbers, for example, on the number of anchor firms coming to Canada and how many Canadian companies participate in global value chains. "We don't have those metrics yet."

"The fundamental question for both of the Budget's major innovation initiatives — clusters and networks and clean tech, both of which are pretty broad — is how should we judge where those investments of public funds should go? What metrics would allow us to say, with some degree of confidence, that we're creating initiatives or institutions that have the ability to make good bets that are well supported," said Marta Morgan, associate DM at Finance Canada.

The Privy Council Office could play an important role in this exercise. The Budget included $99 million over two years to help the PCO provide more "evidence-based" decision-making. Watters said the government may be trying to build capacity within the PCO initially to compensate for deep cuts to policy capacity across government over the past decade. The government has committed to establish a results and delivery unit within PCO, headed by Mowat Centre director Matthew Mendelsohn.

R$