News from the IPL
UPCOMING WEBINARS
Urban Leadership & Innovation During Times of Crisis
Dec. 3, 2020, 1-2pm
Urban leaders are the frontlines of crisis response, from the COVID-19 the pandemic and its associated economic, social and fiscal challenges to the growing protests over racial and economic justice and the looming reality of climate change. This session highlights the way urban leaders can best respond to build more inclusive, just and resilient cities and generate the policy innovations that can shape enduring change.
Richard Florida: University Professor at University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, Distinguished Fellow at NYU and FIU, and Co-Founder and Senior Editor, The Atlantic City Lab
Anita McGahan: University Professor and George E. Connell Chair in Organizations and Society, Rotman School of Management and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
Shauna Brail: Associate Professor, Institute for Management & Innovation, University of Toronto Mississauga and Senior Associate, Innovation Policy Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
Supriya Dwivedi (Moderator) Host of The Morning Show on Global News Radio 640 Toronto
Inclusive Innovation: COVID and After
December 10, 2020, 10-11am
Canada is neither as innovative as it needs to be, nor as egalitarian as it aspires to be. Are the two related? Accumulating evidence suggests that countries with lower inequality tend to be more innovative, while greater innovation generates growth that can be more widely distributed. But how exactly can more inclusive innovation economies be brought about and what are the barriers we face in doing so? In this webinar, panelists from the Innovation Policy Lab, Case Western Reserve University, and YWCA Canada will discuss the importance of inclusive innovation; policies needed to bring it about; opportunities and prospects for doing so in the era of COVID-19; and new initiatives for measuring and tracking progress – including GDP 2.0 and the Innovation Policy Lab’s Inclusive Innovation Monitor.
Dan Breznitz: Co-Director, Innovation Policy Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy; Co-Director, Program on Innovation, Equity and the Future of Prosperity, CIFAR
Susan Helper: Carlton Professor of Economics at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University; Co-Director, Program on Innovation, Equity and the Future of Prosperity, CIFAR
Daniel Munro: Senior Fellow, Innovation Policy Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy; Research Advisor, Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
Anjum Sultana National Director of Policy Policy and Communications, YWCA Canada
Editor's Pick
A Portrait of Creative Entrepreneurship and the Creative Economy in Canada
Nisa Malli & Stephanie Fielding, Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
From freelancers to internationally competitive firms, this report explores the state of creative entrepreneurship and its vital role in Canada’s innovation economy. This initial literature review explores the definition and role of creative entrepreneurship in Canada, from freelance artists to large and internationally-competitive firms, drawing on existing literature and data. It provides intersectional and gendered analysis on creative work and businesses, the role of creative entrepreneurship and creative labour in the innovation economy, and early analysis on the impact of the pandemic. It is the first in a series of Brookfield Institute reports, building on previous research on tech workers and the tech sector, women founders, and scaling firms and part of a research initiative on Women Entrepreneurs in partnership with the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub. Insights drawn from this project will inform research questions delving deeper into the current and future state of creative entrepreneurship, creative work, and the creative sector in Canada. It was developed in tandem with OCADU’s WEKH-funded 2019-2020 research project: Critical Perspectives on Creative Women’s Entrepreneurship.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Tim Moonen, Ellie Cosgrave, Jake Nunley and Oliver Zanetti, NESTA
While nation states have scrambled to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, lower tiers of government – that is, subnational government (SNG) institutions – have needed to be particularly agile and innovative to tackle an unprecedented crisis. But the pandemic can also be seen as an additional innovation challenge for cities and regions as they now tackle disrupted economies, fiscal strains, revealed inequality, political polarisation and the climate imperative. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the development of SNG international collaborations for innovation and sets out some of the range and potential of such collaborations for SNGs still considering how to maximise the value of engaging in these networks in the post-COVID-19 period. This report draws on a set of 10 carefully selected case studies of SNG international collaboration, and the reflections of experienced senior practitioners, experts and external observers, to indicate pathways for SNGs to navigate this complex area of innovation and position themselves for future success. The 10 case studies have been chosen to illustrate the geographical, conceptual and technical variety of collaborations worldwide
Global Fintech Ecosystem Report 2020
Startup Genome
The Global Fintech Ecosystem Report 2020 ranks the top 20 FinTech startup ecosystems in the world. Toronto-Waterloo, ranked 12th, was the only Canadian region to make the list. The number one location was Silicon Valley, followed by New York, then London.
2020 Scoring Canadian Tech Talent
CBRE
Toronto has once again taken the top spot in the CBRE Scoring Canadian Tech Talent report rankings, growing its tech talent pool by 36.5 percent between 2014 and 2019. The report estimated that Toronto’s 250,000 tech workers represented 8.8 percent of Toronto’s workforce. Nationally, the number of Tech Talent workers has increased by 22.5% in the past five years, or 4.1% annually, adding 165,300 jobs to the Canadian economy at a pace more than three times the national average, 7.1% over five years or 1.4% annually.
Statistics
The OECD STAN Database for industrial analysis
Peter Horvat & Colin Webb, OECD
This paper summarises and describes the variables, industries, methods and sources used in the construction of the STructural ANalysis (STAN) industry database. The STAN database serves as a tool for analysing industrial performance at a relatively detailed level of industrial activity. It includes annual measures of output, value added and its components, as well as labour input, investment and capital stock from 1970 onwards. This allows for a wide range of comparative cross-country analyses focusing on, for example, productivity growth, competitiveness and economic structural change. A standard industry list allows for comparisons across countries and provides sufficient detail to focus on, for example, high R&D-intensive activities, high digital-intensive activities or detailed ICT industries. The industry list is compatible with those used in related OECD industry databases.
Canadian VC & PE Market Overview
Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association
In the third quarter of 2020, CAD $891M was invested over 126 deals , which is over 63% lower than the amount invested in the third quarter of 2019 and 47% lower than the previous quarter of this year (CAD $1.7B). There were only three mega-deals (CAD $50M+) that closed in Q32020 versus eight in the previous quarter. As a result, the average deal size in Q32020 was only CAD $7M, bringing down the YTD average deal size to CAD $8.5M; in contrast to 2019, when the average deal size was $CAD 11M.
Innovation Policy
Encouraging Digital Security Innovation
Global Forum on Digital Security for Prosperity, OECD
This document summarizes discussions held at the second annual event of the OECD Global Forum on Digital Security for Prosperity. The event, held on 14-15 November 2019 in London, brought together 160 experts and 30 speakers from government, business, civil society, the technical community and academia to discuss how to encourage digital security innovation. Participants explored the roles that different stakeholders can play in stimulating digital security innovation, including how governments can support it for example by implementing tax incentives, acting as an early customer for innovative products, and enacting flexible and outcome-based regulation. A digital security innovation ecosystem is the most important component of a strategic approach, as it brings together different stakeholder groups in a dedicated location. Participants discussed how different ecosystems can learn from one another through international co-operation and considered how governments can encourage digital security by design in innovation more generally.
China’s Country-as-platform Strategy for Global Influence
Sangeet Paul Choudary, Brookings Institute
As platforms continue to grow, control over the trade in goods and services is shifting from countries to digital platforms. And as trade, labor, and money grow increasingly digitized and are exchanged on platforms, countries need to rethink their positions in the global flow of these goods. If they are to gain a competitive advantage, countries need to increasingly pursue a platform strategy. This article argues that “no country is doing this as effectively as China”, which in recent years has set up a concerted country-as-a-platform strategy, aggressively exporting its digital infrastructure, playing a critical role in the development of technical standards, and developing unique points of control in the digital economy. Much like Google established itself as a dominant player in the smartphone ecosystem, China is attempting to do the same in an increasingly digital geopolitical landscape.
Policy Digest
The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
David Autor, David Mindell, Elisabeth Reynolds, MIT Work of the Future Task Force
This report summarizes the findings of two years of research by the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. Commissioned in the spring of 2018. the commission has examined the relationships between emerging technologies and work, to help shape public discourse around realistic expectations of technology, and to explore strategies to enable a future of shared prosperity. The Task Force’s members include more than 20 faculty members drawn from 12 departments at MIT, as well as over 20 graduate students.
The report documents the challenges facing the U.S. labor market, surveying the technological frontier to draw lessons about the pace and direction of change and its likely impacts on employment, skill demands, and opportunity. The authors illustrate how novel technology brings new types of employment, noting about 63 percent of jobs performed in 2018 did not exist in 1940.
Six overarching conclusions and policy recommendations:
1) Technological change is simultaneously replacing existing work and creating new work. It is not eliminating work altogether.
The report states that there is “no intrinsic conflict between technological change, full employment, and rising earnings.” However, the authors note that in practice, technology has polarized the economy. White-collar workers — in medicine, marketing, design, research, and more — have become more productive and richer, while middle-tier workers have lost out. Meanwhile, there has been growth in lower-paying service-industry jobs where digitization has little impact — such as food services, janitors, and drivers. Since 1978, aggregate U.S. productivity has risen by 66 percent, while compensation for production and non-supervisory workers has risen by only 10 percent. Wage gaps also exist by race and gender, and cities do not provide the “escalator” to the middle class they once did. The authors also note that “in what should be a virtuous cycle, rising productivity provides society with the resources to invest in those whose livelihoods are disrupted by the changing structure of work.”
2) Momentous impacts of technological change are unfolding gradually.
The task force report surveys technology adoption in industries including insurance, health care, manufacturing, and autonomous vehicles, finding growth in “narrow” AI systems that complement, rather than replace workers. Technologies that could lead to more direct replacement of workers, like better robotic dexterity, are further off in the future.
3) Rising labor productivity has not translated into broad increases in incomes because societal institutions and labor market policies have fallen into disrepair.
Labour market policy has not been innovative enough to account for the polarizing effects of technology on jobs for middle- and lower-income workers. Instead, in terms of pay, working environment, termination notice time, paid vacation time, sick time, and family leave, “less-educated and low-paid U.S. workers fare worse than comparable workers in other wealthy industrialized nations,” the report notes. The adjusted gross hourly earnings of lower-skill workers in the U.S. in 2015 averaged $10.33, compared to $24.28 in Denmark, $18.18 in Germany, and $17.61 in Australia. Looking ahead, the report cautions, “If those technologies deploy into the labor institutions of today, which were designed for the last century, we will see similar effects to recent decades: downward pressure on wages, skills, and benefits, and an increasingly bifurcated labor market.”
4) Improving the quality of jobs requires innovation in labor market institutions.
The task force contends the U.S. needs to modernize labor policies on several fronts, including restoring the federal minimum wage to a reasonable percentage of the national median wage and indexing it for inflation. The report also suggests upgrading unemployment insurance in several ways, including: using very recent earnings to determine eligibility or linking eligibility to hours worked, not earnings; making it easier to receive partial benefits in case of events like loss of a second job; and dropping the requirement that people need to seek full-time work to receive benefits, since so many people hold part-time positions. The report also calls for better protection of collective bargaining rights; new forms of workplace representation beyond traditional unions; and legal protections allowing groups to organize that include home-care workers, farm workers, and independent contractors.
5) Fostering opportunity and economic mobility necessitates cultivating and refreshing worker skills.
The report stresses that U.S. workers need more opportunities to add new skills — whether through the community college system, online education, company-based retraining, or other means. This is particularly true for workers without university degrees. The report calls for making ongoing skills development accessible, engaging, and cost-effective. This requires buttressing what already works, while advancing new tools: blended online and in-person offerings, machine-supervised learning, and augmented and virtual reality learning environments.
6) Investing in innovation will drive new job creation, speed growth, and meet rising competitive challenges.
The rate of new-job creation over the last century is heavily driven by technological innovation, the report notes, with a considerable portion of that stemming from federal investment in R&D, which has helped produce many forms of computing and medical advances, among other things. As of 2015, the U.S. invested 2.7 percent of its GDP in R&D, compared to 2.9 percent in Germany and 2.1 percent in China. But the public share of that R&D investment has fallen from 40 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2015. The task force calls for a re-commitment to this federal support. The report calls for increased overall federal research funding; targeted assistance that helps small- and medium-sized businesses adopt technology; policies creating a wider geographical spread of innovation in the U.S.; and policies that enhance investment in workers, not just capital, including the elimination of accelerated capital depreciation claims, and an employer training tax credit that functions like the R&D tax credit.
Links to recent IPL webinars
Canada’s Innovation Imperative
This is a recording of the November 9, 2020 event. Innovation contributes to regional and national prosperity and is a well-established economic concept. To succeed in building capacity and strength in this technical realm, government policies must be deliberate, systematic and rooted in expertise. Data shows that Canada missed the shift from the tangible to intangible economy. Moving forward, how can we make sure Canada builds competitive advantage through policy that leverages innovation for tomorrow’s economy? Speakers: Jim Balsillie, Dan Breznitz, Meagan Simpson (moderator).
This is a recording of the November 12, 2020 event. Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins outlines how the COVID-19 crisis has damaged economic potential and discusses what will be needed to thrive in the post-pandemic world. Speakers: Carolyn Wilkins, Michael Sabia, Shauna Brail (moderator).
Policymaking Under Uncertainty
This is a recording of the Oct. 14th, 2020 event focused on Policymaking Under Uncertainty. Policymaking is a challenging endeavour under the best of times, as politicians and bureaucrats seek to juggle the need for rapid and innovative interventions on the one hand with democratic accountability on the other. Speakers: Uri Gabai, Darius Ornston, Sylvia Schwaag Serger, and Dan Breznitz
This is a recording of the Jul 16th, 2020 event focused on exploring the short and long term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Panelists included Catherine Beaudry, Ben Spigel, Tara Vinodrai, and David Wolfe.
Will COVID-19 Bring Us Together or Blow Us Apart? The Global Security Implications of the Pandemic
This is a recording of the July 7th, 2020 event focused on the national and international security implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Janice Stein discusses the historical security lessons of previous pandemics and depressions, Jon Lindsay considers emerging military and strategic dangers exacerbated by COVID-19, and Ron Deibert discusses the cybersecurity and surveillance threats associated with the unprecedented relocation of life online.
This is a recording of the June 11, 2020 event focused on how will COVID-19 shape the future of our cities. Join experts Anita McGahan, Shauna Brail (School of Cities), and Nathalie des Rosiers (Massey College), Richard Florida (School of Cities Professor) as they discuss cities after COVID with Marcia Young, host of CBC’s World Report.
This is a recording of the June 11, 2020 event focused on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education. Speakers: Shiri Breznitz, Heike Mayer, Donald Siegel and Elvira Uyarra.
The Future of (Decent?) Work After COVID-19
This is a recording of the May 26, 2020 Munk School / Innovation Policy Lab / CIFAR event focused on the future of work after COVID-19. Speakers: Dan Breznitz, Zabeen Hirji and Peter Warrian.
This is a recording of the May 11th 2020 event focused on “what will the world look like in the wake of COVID-19?” Speakers: Shauna Brail, Anita McGahan, Tara Vinodrai and Shiri Breznitz.
COVID-19 and the World’s Grand Challenges
This is a recording of the May 8th 2020 event focused on “what impact will COVID-19 have on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?” Speakers: Anita McGahan, Joseph Wong and Karlee Silver.
How is COVID-19 affecting global supply chains?
This is a recording of the April 29th 2020 event focused on “how is COVID-19 affecting supply chains in Canada and around the globe?” Speakers: Dan Breznitz, Shauna Brail and Steven Denney.
Events
WICK#8 PhD workshop organized by YSI and Collegio Carlo Alberto
10-11 December, 2020, Turin
The Vilfredo Pareto Doctoral Program in Economics – University of Turin and the Complexity Economics Working Group – YSI (Young Scholars Initiative) are pleased to announce the 8th International PhD Workshop in Economics of Innovation, Complexity and Knowledge (WICK#8), sponsored by BRICK and Collegio Carlo Alberto. The aim of the workshop is to bring together young researchers from different disciplines and provide them an opportunity of discussion of both full and early works.
Regional Innovation Policies Conference
Aalborg, Denmark, 25-26 March 2021 CANCELLED
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak the conference scheduled for March 25 and 26, 2021 in Aalborg, Denmark has been cancelled. The next RIP Conference is scheduled for Prague in August, 2021. The conference will focus on regions in transformation – as well as transformations in regional innovation policy and new developments in methods for defining and analyzing regions. Submission deadline: 30th November 2020.
May 10-13, 2021 | May 10 – Pre-conference Summer School
Virtual conference
The Partnership for the Organization of Innovation (4POINT0) is organizing the first ‘‘Policies, Processes and Practices for Performance of Innovation Ecosystems” (P4IE) international conference on 10-13 May 2020. Organized around eight highly relevant tracks, the conference offers participants the opportunity to discuss the impact of various technologies, practices, processes and policies, on innovation ecosystems, and the best means by which to design collaborative environments. The goal of the conference is to explore ways to strengthen Canada’s innovation through innovation ecosystems.
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This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe