News from the IPL
RESEARCH
Dan Breznitz, Brazillian Center For International Relations (CEBRI) Webinar, Jun 15, 2021 9-10:15am ET
Speakers:
- Dan Breznitz, Professor and Munk Chair of Innovation Studies and Co-Director of the Political Innovation Laboratory at the University of Toronto’s Munk School & Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Innovation, Equity and Future Program
- Rainer Kattel, Professor of Innovation and Public Governance and Deputy Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) at University College London
Moderator:
- Caetano C.R. Penna, Senior Research Fellow in Global Sustainability Transitions at Utrecht University
Inaugural Jerzy Gajewski Lecture to the European Financial Congress
Dan Breznitz
This link provides a video of the June 14th inaugural Jerzy Gajewski lecture to the European Financial Congress by IPL Co-director Dan Breznitz, titled “Innovation strategies for the development of regions and cities – prospects for growth and local prosperity.” Dan also took part in a panel discussion with former Prime Minister Bielecki after the address. Dan’s talk begins at 3:51:00.
Mending the Net: Public Strategies for the Remediation of Network Failures
Steven Samford & Dan Breznitz Social Forces
Market and hierarchical/organizational failures have long been the target of public policies explicitly aimed to mitigate their negative effects. However, in spite of a growing interest in policies around industrial clusters and business networks, scholarship on public efforts at remediating network failures has been ad hoc and lacking a binding theory. A central question is what strategies public agencies employ to repair network failures. We begin to answer this question by distinguishing between two distinct approaches: (1) “network construction” in which government agents actively build, re-shape, or thicken the structures of private sector networks;and (2) “network activation” in which government agents seek to alter the internal dynamics of existing private sector networks. To provide empirical support for these concepts, we provide a series of short international examples to illustrate the scope of network remediation activities as well as two in-depth cases that demonstrate how these mechanisms can work: the Canadian Industrial Research Assistance Program(IRAP) and the specialized Mexican Lead Substitution Program.
PRESS
David Wolfe, Special to the Financial Post
This article by IPL Co-director David Wolfe asserts that Climate change, environmental sustainability and public health concerns are now the critical lenses through which all potential innovations must be filtered.
The Innovation Imperative: Why Canada needs to harness the power of the platform economy
Shauna Brail, Special to the Financial Post
This article by IPL Senior Associate argues that if we want to avoid being the equivalent of a branch plant economy for platform firms, we need to act.
Steven Denney and David Wolfe Special to Financial Post
This article by IPL Co-Director David Wolfe and IPL Post Doctoral Fellow Steven Denney lays out the economic case for focusing innovation supports on Scale-ups. The article notes that these firms are well positioned to advance through the recovery and be a main source of net job growth
Dan Breznitz and Dan Munro, Special to Financial Post
This article by IPL Co-Director Dan Breznitz and IPL Director of Policy Projects Dan Munro articulates why bridging the digital divide is so central to unlocking Canada’s innovation potential. The article argues that that Canada cannot afford to leave our most promising future entrepreneurs and Einsteins behind.
Editor's Pick
Getting to Scale: Accelerating Canada’s high-growth companies
Sheldon Levy, Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
This report from Sheldon Levy, Special Advisor to the Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion, explores offers a road-map for practitioners and policymakers alike, identifying targeted high-impact interventions to support Canadian high-potential scale-ups. Based on work conducted in 2019, this report explores the most important barriers that scale-ups face along their growth journey and also provides critical insights on the experience of companies in accessing business services, supports, and financing. This report is the result of more than 100 interviews with 50 senior executives of firms at various stages of growth and over 60 ecosystem experts and stakeholders. Getting to Scale offers a road-map for practitioners and policymakers alike, identifying targeted high-impact interventions to support Canadian high-potential scale-ups.
Cities & Regions
The impact of regional inequality on economic growth: a spatial econometric approach
Domenica Panzera & Paolo Postiglione, Regional Studies
This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and regional income inequality in a spatial econometric perspective. The role of space in the measure of inequality is discussed, and a new theoretical model that relates inequality with economic growth is introduced. The proposed model extends a spatial Mankiw–Romer–Weil specification by introducing regional income inequality as a determinant of economic growth. The measure of inequality proposed as a covariate in the model is derived by a spatial decomposition of the Gini index. An empirical analysis focused on European Union NUTS-2 regions is carried out to illustrate the model.
Statistics
Federal government spending on science and technology, 2021/2022
Statistics Canada
Preliminary spending on S&T by the Canadian federal government is expected to reach $16.0 billion in 2020/2021, up 26.7% from what was originally intended. Looking ahead to the upcoming 2021/2022 fiscal year, survey results indicate that S&T spending intentions are expected to decrease compared with preliminary estimates, down 13.7% to $13.9 billion, as Canada enters the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal Science Expenditures and Personnel, Activities in the Social Sciences and Natural Sciences is an annual survey of all federal government departments and agencies that perform or fund science and technology activities. Actual data for 2019/2020, preliminary data for 2020/2021 and intentions for 2021/2022 were collected from September to December 2020, based on the federal government’s fiscal year running from April 1 to March 31.
Beyond Patents: Canada’s Intellectual Property Puzzle
Innovation Economy Council
There is a widespread perception that Canadian inventors and entrepreneurs are lagging badly in the global race for dominance in vital areas of technology. Across the broad spectrum of Canadian companies, it is true that the level of sophistication about intellectual property is relatively low. A just-completed survey by the Innovation Economy Council found much deeper knowledge and use of IP among a select group of ventures that have been advised by one of the four hubs that participated in the survey. Of the 50 companies that responded, 90 percent of them own trade secrets, 71 percent have registered patents or patent applications pending and 59 percent have trademarks or service marks already registered or pending.
Innovation Policy
Ideas for Sale: Why IP is a Symptom, Not a Cause, of Canada’s Failure to Scale
Innovation Economy Council
This article explores the issue of IP ownership as a symptom of Canada’s inability to produce scale-up companies. The article notes that three-quarters of the patents held by venture capital-backed Canadian startups involved in recent takeovers are now in foreign hands. Ownership of more than 200 promising young companies, along with a trove of valuable intellectual property, has left the country since 2017, mainly to the U.S.
Ontario Government commits $100 million to new tech fund of funds
Megan Simpson, Betakit
Government of Ontario is committing $100 million towards a new fund of funds focused on supporting high-potential tech companies in the province. The $100 million includes a $60 million commitment made in 2018 under the Ontario Liberal Party and $40 million of net new capital. The new Venture Ontario Fund will be tasked with dispersing the $100 million to venture capital funds focused on “high-growth sectors where Ontario has a competitive advantage,” such as life sciences, medical devices, clean technology, information technology, and artificial intelligence.
Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership
Kean Birch & D. T. Cochrane, Science as Culture
This paper outlines four emerging forms of digital rentiership in Big Techecosystems reflecting the similarities and diversities in Big Tech firms them-selves: (1)‘enclave rents’ created through the control of ecosystems; (2)‘expected monopoly rents ’created through the performative fulfilment of future narratives; (3)‘engagement rents’ constituted via rankings and metrics that differentiate users by their engagement with digital services and products;and (4)‘reflexivity rents ’obtained by exploiting ecosystem rules and norms. Above all, the authors’ aim to illustrate how economic rents can be made from the control of many different things. Before we get to these emerging forms of rentiership, however, we briefly outline the rise of Big Tech.
Policy Digest
Senate approves new $10 billion program for regional technology hubs
Jason Rittenberg, SSTI
This post summarizes key elements of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, a legislative package recently passed by the U.S. Senate that includes the Endless Frontier Act. The Bill’s $250 billion in funding includes $10 billion for regional technology hubs, $100 billion in new R&D-related activities, and a threefold increase in funding of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program. The Bill also includes $52 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations to implement the semiconductor-related manufacturing and R&D programs authorized in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act and a program to support legacy chip production that is essential to the auto industry, the military, and other critical industries.
The Bill’s main proponent, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer noted that the “Senate passage of the bipartisan U.S. Innovation and Competition Act moves forward historic legislation to invest in science, technology, and U.S. manufacturing that will shore up critical industries like semiconductors, artificial intelligence, advanced communications like 5G, quantum computing, biotechnology, and advanced energy.”
In a statement applauding the Bill’s passage, President Biden noted the following: “we are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off. As other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind. America must maintain its position as the most innovative and productive nation on Earth. I look forward to working with the House of Representatives on this important bipartisan legislation, and I look forward to signing it into law as soon as possible.”
The SSTI post summarizes the key elements of the Bill as follows:
Regional Technology Hubs
The Senate bill would authorize the Department of Commerce to designate at least three new “regional technology hubs” in each of the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) six regions. These hubs would be proposed by consortia including state and local governments, institutions of higher education, labor and industry representatives, venture development organizations and others. Each hub would focus on advancing its regional capacity to support research, commercialization and competitiveness related to a key technology area.
The proposal includes two types of funding to support regions:
- Strategy development grants could be awarded to any consortia in order to help build a regional innovation strategy. The bill authorizes $575 million for this program over five years.
- Strategy implementation grants are available only to approved regional technology hubs and could be used for a broad array of activities, from addressing capital access to workforce development. The bill authorizes $9.4 billion for this program over five years.
New R&D-related Authority
The act authorizes approximately $109 billion for R&D-related activities from FY 2022-2026. This includes $81 billion for the National Science Foundation (NSF), $6.9 billion for R&D at the Department of Energy, $2.4 billion for Manufacturing USA institutes, and $17.5 billion for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of the funding authorized to NSF and Energy would have a 20 percent set-aside for EPSCoR jurisdictions.
NSF would see the most substantial new authorities, as the bill authorizes a new Directorate of Technology and Innovation. The directorate would largely focus on expanding the nation’s capacity to engage in development and commercialization activities within key technology areas. These activities could include funding research “test beds” and “innovation centers” to focus on demonstrating tech deployment, and “innovation institutes” to fund consortia to advance tech commercialization.
Additional Provisions
The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act includes numerous other authorities, including the following:
- $50 billion to fund the semiconductor research centers and other elements of the CHIPS Act that passed Congress during last year’s defense authorization process — unlike most other sections of the bill, this would be actual funding;
- Tripling the authorization level for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program;
- A suite of new policies overseeing research partnerships or funding arrangements between China and U.S. institutions and individuals;
- Complete reauthorization for NASA;
- The Research Investment to Spark the Economy (RISE) Act, which authorizes funding to offset disruptions to university research caused by the pandemic;
- A new supply chain resiliency program within EDA to develop domestic capacity for the production of critical goods;
- New biosciences R&D policy that would require the White House to play a greater role in coordinating biosciences investment across federal research agencies; and,
- A foundation to support innovation at the Department of Energy, primarily by facilitating industry partnerships around federal R&D.
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.
Inclusive Innovation: COVID and After
This is a recording of the December 10th 2020 webinar discussing 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. Speakers: Dan Breznitz, Susan Helper, Daniel Munro, & Anjum Sultana
Urban Leadership & Innovation During Times of Crisis
This is a recording of the Dec 3rd 2020 webinar discussing how 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. Speakers: Richard Florida, Anita McGahan, Shauna Brail, & Supriya Dwivedi
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).
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.
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.
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.
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