Volume Twenty-two
Issue # 449 (September 7, 2021)
- Introduction
- News From the IPL
- Editor’s Pick
- Cities & Regions
- Statistics
- Innovation Policy
- Links to Recent IPL Webinars
- Events
Introduction
This newsletter is published by The Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
News From the IPL
RESEARCH
Tracey M. White and David A. Wolfe
This SSHRC-funded Knowledge Synthesis Report was prepared by U of T Political Science PhD Candidate Tracey White and IPL Co-Director David A. Wolfe. Literature analyzed here illuminates the nature of adult education, learning and skills development and forms of work organization as factors in Canada’s innovation performance. In the World Economic Forum’s 2017-18 Global Competitiveness Survey Canada ranked 23rd on its ‘capacity for innovation’ metric. If this country is to have a prosperous, innovative economy then the skills and ingenuity of its people matter. Skills development opportunities for Canadians beyond the formal pre-career education systems are inadequate to meet the demands of a rapidly digitizing economy. It is increasingly clear that Canada’s fragmented approach to adult education is an impediment to labour market flexibility and social mobility on which the digital economy depends. Canada’s labour market institutions were developed to meet the needs of an industrial economy. The moment has arrived to re-imagine them to support Canada as a learning economy. This report reviews the approach of the Danish innovation system to provide an alternative example. It urges Canadian policymakers to make development of human resources a higher priority by reinvigorating labour market governance arrangements and realigning incentives to meet the needs of a digital economy.
Darius Ornston, IPL Affiliated Faculty
The Waterloo region in Canada has emerged as an unlikely competitor in high-technology markets, challenging theories based on path dependency, population density, anchor firms, and military spending. While theorists and residents attribute the rise of high-technology entrepreneurship to cooperation, evidence of collaboration is sparse. This article resolves this puzzle by explaining how ideas can coordinate action in loosely coupled systems. Dense, cross-cutting civic networks may not have supported task-specific cooperation, but they facilitated the construction and diffusion of collective narratives. Conventionally understood to leverage locational assets, the Waterloo case demonstrates how storytelling can also soften geographic constraints. Success stories inspired entrepreneurs by re-conceptualizing what was possible, peer-to-peer mentoring helped firms to navigate local constraints, and external marketing enabled the region to access resources it could not mobilize internally. By documenting the importance of storytelling as a form of collective action, the Waterloo case illuminates a broader array of strategies available to local change agents and smaller regions.
Editor’s Pick
The climate crisis and the global economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis occur against a background of slowing growth and widening inequalities, which together imply an urgent need for a new environmentally sustainable and inclusive approach to growth. Investments in “clean” innovation and its diffusion are key to shaping this, accompanied by investments in complementary assets including sustainable infrastructure, and human, natural and social capital which will not only help achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, but will also improve productivity, living standards and the prospects of individuals. This article drawa on the theoretical and empirical evidence on the opportunities, drivers and policies for innovation-led sustainable growth. It highlights the importance of a coordinated set of long-term policies and institutions that can enable and foster private sector investments in clean innovation and assets quickly and at scale. In doing so, its draws inspiration from Chris Freeman’s work on the system-wide drivers of innovation, and his early vision of achieving environmental sustainability by reorienting growth.
Cities & Regions
Statistics
Industrial research and development, 2019 (actual), 2020 (preliminary) and 2021 (intentions)
Statistics Canada
In 2019, Canadian businesses spent a record high of $21.7 billion on in-house R&D, which marked a 3.8% increase over 2018 spending. This increase was mainly attributed to a rise in the salary and wages component, as the number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) of R&D personnel rose by 2,549 to reach 167,956 FTEs. The main drivers behind this increase were services-producing industries, particularly those in information and communication technology (ICT) and businesses engaged in software engineering R&D. Preliminary estimates, which are typically conservative, show that in-house R&D expenditures decreased by 3.2% in 2020 to $21.0 billion, while they are projected to stay at $21.0 billion in 2021. The dominance of the ICT sector’s R&D spending is reflected in its R&D intensity, or ratio of R&D spending to value added. From 2014 to 2019, Canadian businesses spent around 1.2% of their total value added (gross domestic product—GDP) on R&D. Over that same period, ICT companies spent between 7.1% and 9.4% of their GDP on R&D.
H1 2021 – VC & PE Canadian Market Overview
Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association
This report summarizes VC and PE investment in Canad for H1 2021. Overall, CAD $5.6B was invested across 216 deals in Q22021 bringing the total VC investment to CAD $8.3B across 394 deals for the first half of 2021, eclipsing all previous full-year totals on CVCA records. There were 39 mega-deals (CAD +$50M) in H12021 totalling CAD $6.2B and accounting for 75% of total dollars invested in the half; a sharp increase from the four mega-deals in H12020. H12021 saw the largest funding round on record, with Toronto-based Fintech company Wealthsimple closing CAD $750M in growth funding in May. The average deal size in H12021 was CAD $21M, an all-time high.
Picking up Speed: Digital Maturity in Canadian SMEs and Why Increasing it Matters
Thomas Goldsmith, Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
This report contextualizes the current state of digital maturity to help inform the rollout of future programs and feed into Canada’s long-term prosperity. This report was produced in partnership with the Toronto Regional Board of Trade, World Trade Centre Toronto, and the Scale-Up Institute Toronto, and sponsored by Xero. Digital maturity reflects the use of digital technologies by enterprises in all sectors, not just in technology-developing ones. It comprises the technological intensity of a business (the level of technology adoption and use across both internal and customer-facing operations and processes), and its digital culture (whether it has the skills, leadership, and governance in place to successfully integrate digital technologies).
Innovation Policy
Links to Recent IPL Webinars
Canada’s Quantum Internet: Prospects and Perils
This is a recording of the April 20, 2021 webinar that together experts to discuss the political, economic, and scientific implications of quantum communications, for Canada and the world .Speakers: Francesco Bova, Associate Professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto; Anne Broadbent, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa; Jon Lindsay, Assistant Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Department of Political Science, University of Toronto; Christoph Simon, Professor and Associate Head, Research, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Calgary; & Dan Patterson (moderator), Technology Reporter, CBS News
Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship in Canada
This is a recording of the March 23rd 2021 webinar focused on the importance of IP protection for entrepreneurship, the intellectual property environment in Canada, and existing support for firms. Panelists discussed issues relating to their firm’s ability to secure IP especially as it relates to IP education and the role of government in supporting IP protection. Speakers: Seray Çiçek, Ryan Hubbard, Graeme Moffat, Moderator: Shiri Breznitz
Canada’s future skills strategy: Workforce development for inclusive innovation
This is a recording of the January 19th 2021 webinar discussing the Future Skills Council report, released in November 2020, which recommends equitable and competitive labour market strategies in response to disruptive technological, economic, social and environmental events. It aims to provide a roadmap to a stronger, more resilient future for Canada. In this webinar, panelists discuss the report’s key action areas and pathways to successful implementation. Speakers: Rachel Wernick, Denise Amyot, Dan Munro, & David Ticoll.
Events
October 18-20, 2021, Copenhagen, Denmark
Since 1996, DRUID has become one of the world’s premier academic conferences on innovation and the dynamics of structural, institutional and geographic change. DRUID is proud to invite senior and junior scholars to participate and contribute with a paper to DRUID21, hosted by Copenhagen Business School. Presenting distinguished plenary speakers, a range of parallel paper sessions, and an attractive social program, the conference aims at mapping theoretical, empirical and methodological advances, contributing novel insights, and help identifying scholarly positions, divisions, and common grounds in current scientific controversies within the field. Please note that due to the global COVID-19 health crisis, DRUID21 is scheduled to take place in October, rather than its usual time in June. The conference will only take place if travel and health regulations permit.
Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) Conference 2022
January 17-21, 2022, Digital Conference
The 2022 Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) Conference is asking for a wide range of participants from across many disciplines and fields to submit ideas for panels, demonstrations, initiatives, and projects that work towards transformations for sustainability and a just transition. The ‘Call for Initiatives’ is open now until 4 September 2021 and encourage Expressions of Interest (EoI) from a wide set of contributors across research, civil society, business and policy. This is a short extension so please get your EOI in as soon as possible. The theme is “BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE KNOWLEDGE INFRASTRUCTURE ON TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION POLICY.” The aim of the sessions is to be a symphony of approaches and collaborations to mix-up the conference dynamic and offer a chance to experiment with building knowledge infrastructures and exchanges across sectors and disciplines to activate transformational system change to solve our Earth crisis. The TIP Conference 2022 is organised and funded by the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) and the European Forum for Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation (Eu-SPRI) with the participation of Globelics and Africalics members and with the involvement of Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN) members.
6th Geography of Innovation Conference
January 26-28, 2022, Bocconi University, Milan
The conference brings together leading scholars on the spatial dimension of innovation processes. It is a forum for interdisciplinary research on this topics, including perspectives from economic geography, innovation economics, and regional science, as well as economics and management science, sociology and network theory, and political and planning sciences.
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This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe