Rethinking Innovation Coordination and Support – Data-driven and collaborative solutions to empower firms in their innovative endeavours

Business innovation is key to improving productivity and prosperity, and Canada’s underperformance in this area is cause for concern. This presentation explores the ways companies overcome innovation hurdles, such as financial constraints, tariffs, and geopolitical tensions, and how government policies and innovation ecosystem orchestration can effectively support their efforts. To begin, it offers empirical insights into the ways that companies proactively address and alleviate innovation hurdles through a range of initiatives and use of public support programs, all while navigating financial limitations. Government support programs are most effective when combined with firms’ own efforts and show strong results for financial and market-related barriers, but less so for skill and regulatory challenges – which require a more coordinated ecosystemic approach. This highlights the need for more targeted, multi-level and diversified policy tools. The presentation then explores ways to co-develop innovation policies with measurable objectives and identify key data gaps that can delay or distort the impact assessment process.

 

 

Catherine Beaudry holds a master’s degree and PhD in economics from the University of Oxford. She is a full professor at the Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering and holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Management and Economics of Innovation (Chair Innovation) at Polytechnique Montréal, and leads the Partnership for the Organization of Innovation and New Technologies (4POINT0). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada and the recipient of the Prix Acfas Jacques-Rousseau 2022, the CPSC Public Policy Trailblazer Award in 2023 and the Prix d’excellence en recherche et innovation 2024 from Polytechnique Montréal.