Editor’s note: This is the seventh article since May 20, 2026 in an ongoing series by Dr. Andrew Maxwell, the Bergeron Chair in Technology Entrepreneurship in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University. Every week – and occasionally every other week – we’ll present a new article by Maxwell, in a series whose wide-ranging and incisive themes encompass: Canada and innovation policy; productivity and industry; innovation frameworks; AI and higher education; research and intellectual property; technology adoption; entrepreneurship and commercialization; universities and higher education; entrepreneurship education; and AI and the future of work. 

Canada has never lacked technological brilliance.

What it has lacked – repeatedly – is a clear understanding of where and how value is ultimately captured.

For more than a century, Canada has produced world-class inventions, firms and scientific breakthroughs. Many are still taught in engineering schools, cited in policy documents, and celebrated in national mythology. And yet, again and again, the enduring economic, strategic, and societal benefits have accrued elsewhere – most often in the United States.

This is not a story about villains.
It is a story about learning from failure — and about what must change if Canada wants to win the next battle, rather than explain the last one.

This is also not an argument about American wrongdoing, but about Canadian system design.

Consider a familiar but uncomfortable list:

• The Avro Arrow supersonic interceptor aircraft, cancelled at the peak of its technical excellence.
• BlackBerry, which defined secure mobile communications but lost the platform war
• The Bombardier C Series of jet airliners, technologically superior yet undone by trade rules.
• Artificial intelligence research led by Geoffrey Hinton, foundational to a global industry now dominated by U.S. platforms.
• The discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting and colleagues – given freely to the world, later monetized aggressively elsewhere.
• The cardiac pacemaker, developed in Canada and later industrialized at scale elsewhere.
• Earlier cases like the light bulb and the Robertson screw, where Canadian ingenuity lost out to systems of scale, standards, and diffusion.

Individually, each case has its own explanation.
Collectively, they reveal a structural failure to learn the right lessons.

What these failures were not

These were not failures of:

• Scientific capability.
• Engineering quality.
• Creativity or talent.
• Effort or intent.

Nor can they be reduced to simplistic narratives of American malice or Canadian naïveté.

In nearly every case, Canada won the technical contest.

What it lost was something else entirely.

Across these cases, value did not leave Canada for a single reason. It migrated – predictably and repeatedly – as markets evolved.

In some cases, systems mattered more than components. The light bulb was never the real prize; the electrical grid was. Today, AI models matter far less than access to compute, data and distribution.

In others, platforms displaced products. BlackBerry patented the modern smartphone, but Apple and Google shaped the market in which phones derived their value.

Sometimes, standards mattered more than superiority. The Robertson screw was better engineered, but the Phillips screw scaled more easily through manufacturing ecosystems.

Elsewhere, rules mattered more than performance. The Bombardier C Series didn’t fail in the air; it failed in trade law. The Avro Arrow didn’t lose on capability; it lost through procurement alignment.

And occasionally, values themselves proved fragile without institutions to support them. Insulin – and later the pacemaker – were treated as public goods at their origin, but downstream systems rewarded rent extraction and scale control instead.

In every case, Canada focused upstream – on discovery, invention and excellence – while value accumulated downstream – in control, deployment, and capture.

Why this matters now

AI, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, quantum technologies and biotech all sit at a similar inflection point today.

Canada is once again:

• World-class in research.
• Respected in talent development.
• Confident in ethical positioning.

And once again at risk of:

• Treating commercialization as an afterthought.
• Confusing diffusion with impact.
• Assuming good ideas naturally lead to good outcomes. They do not.

Markets do not reward invention.
They reward control over adoption.

If Canada wants to win the next battle in innovation, five lessons stand out.

1. Stop measuring success where value no longer lives.

Publications, patents and prototypes are inputs – not outcomes.
Value increasingly accumulates in platforms, standards, supply chains and procurement decisions.
If we don’t measure those, we don’t manage them.

2. Design for adoption, not just discovery.

Technologies fail not because they don’t work, but because:

• Perceived benefits don’t outweigh switching costs.
• Incentives don’t align across actors.
• Adoption paths are unclear.

Innovation systems must be built around use, not novelty.
If no one is accountable for adoption, who exactly is responsible for impact?

3. Treat talent retention as a systems problem.

Training the world’s best people and exporting them is not success.
If talent leaves to access compute, capital, customers, or platforms, then those are the assets that must be addressed – not loyalty.

4. Values require institutional backing.

Insulin teaches a hard truth:
Ethics without durable institutions do not survive scale.

If Canada wants different outcomes, it must design procurement rules, licensing models and market structures that encode its values downstream.

5. Winning means choosing where to fight.

Canada cannot win every layer of the value chain.
But it can choose which layers matter most – and build defensible positions there deliberately, not accidentally.

The reframing Canada needs

This article does not argue that the United States “destroyed” Canadian technologies.

It argues something more uncomfortable – and more useful: Canada keeps winning the wrong battles.

The opportunity now is not to relitigate the past, but to learn from it – and to stop mistaking invention for impact.

Winning the next battle means:

• Designing innovation policy around adoption and scale.
• Teaching engineers and researchers where value migrates.
• Building institutions that match our stated values.
• Treating failure not as embarrassment, but as data.

Canada has already proven it can invent the future.

The next generation of technologies will not fail for lack of brilliance, but for lack of institutional imagination.
The unanswered question is whether Canada is finally ready to own what it invents.

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