The IPL newsletter: Volume 22, Issue 455

News from the IPL

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Dan Breznitz awarded Balsillie Prize for Public Policy

IPL Co-director and University of Toronto University Professor Dan Breznitz has been awarded the Balsille Prize for Public Policy by the Writers’ Trust of Canada for his latest book, Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World, published by Oxford University Press.

David Wolfe nominated to the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Council of Canadian Academies

IPL Co-director David Wolfe was recently nominated to serve on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Council of Canadian Academies. The role of the Scientific Advisory Committee is to advise the CCA’s Board on assessment topics, expert panel composition, and peer review.

RESEARCH

Into the Scale-up-verse: Exploring the landscape of Canada’s high-performing firms

Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
Scale-ups, or high-growth firms, are responsible for the vast majority of productivity growth in Canada, making them an immensely powerful tool in the pursuit of Canada’s long-term economic stability and prosperity. However, only 1 in 100 young firms reach scale-up status within their first ten years. How can we harness, support, and amplify the power of scale-ups and their contributions to the Canadian economy?  A collaboration between the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship, this new study, Into the Scale-up-verse, takes the first step toward better equipping policymakers to support the success of Canadian firms by unpacking the complexity and nuance in Canada’s diverse scale-up universe. The research was initiated and funded by Delvinia in partnership with Mitacs and the IPL, and conducted jointly with BII&E.  The report analyzes the most recent and detailed data set concerning Canadian business dynamics to provide a novel and comprehensive guide for those in a position—such as academic researchers, industry players, and government policymakers—to design supportive economic policy and facilitate productive conversations about Canada’s scale-ups.

What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about Innovation

Dan Breznitz
IPL Co-Director Dan Breznitz leads a forum in a new edited volume focused on how local economic development might foster long-term, inclusive prosperity. Dan argues that in today’s world of globally fragmented production and dominating high-tech clusters, efforts to duplicate silicon valley don’t raise all boats. To generate local, inclusive prosperity, cities must think beyond tech accelerators and science parks and instead embrace a wider range of innovation strategies. This forum is part of a new Boston Review book titled Public Purpose: Industrial Policy’s Comeback and Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity. The book’s other forum is led by economist Mariana Mazzucato and articulates an industrial policy agenda organized around ambitious, cross-sector “missions,” designed around important national goals. The authors in this volume collectively argue for “putting public purpose at the center of our politics and policy.” Excerpts from the authors participating in Mariana Mazzucato’s forum are available online here.

Canada as a Learning Economy: Education & Training in an Age of Intelligent Machines Policy Challenges & Policy Responses

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.

How Stories Shape Regional Development: Collective Narratives and High-Technology Entrepreneurship in Waterloo, Canada

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

Green Industrial Policy and the Global Transformation of Climate Politics

Bentley Allan, Joanna I. Lewis, Thomas Oatley, Global Environmental Politics
This article serves as an introduction to the special issue focused on defining green industrial policy and situating it within domestic political economy, social policy, and global geopolitics. The article summarizes six new studies that demonstrate and explore the global politics of green industrial policy. The authors show how green industrial policy has transformed climate politics. Changes in state practice, ideas about the environment and economy, and technological cost declines came together to produce a new opportunistic and competitive climate politics. They then identify areas for further investigation as they call for a new climate politics research agenda, integrating green industrial policy more intentionally into studies of global environmental politics.

Cities & Regions

Emerging regional innovation policies for industry 4.0: analyzing the digital innovation hub program in European regions

Jose-Luis Hervas-Oliver, Gregorio Gonzalez-Alcaide, Ronald Rojas-Alvarado, & Silvia Monto-Mompo Competitiveness Review
Industry 4.0 or digitization, from a regional innovation system (RIS) and policy perspective to
improve regional innovation, is over-looked. Specifically, this paper aims to focus on analyzing the nascent European Commission (EC) digital innovation hub (DIH) program, designed for fostering transition into Industry 4.0 in regions and facilitating new path development. Empirically, 10 Spanish DIH is explored through interviews and secondary data analysis. Findings – The results suggest that DIHs despite their emerging and trial-and-error stage are designed for promoting multi-actor collaborative platforms including non-local actors to stimulate transition into Industry 4.0 by promoting place-based collaboration alliances that respond to local/regional contextual specificities and demands. These regional-based platforms facilitate public-private partnerships that co-design policy initiatives resulting from co-participation and negotiation of spatially-bounded oriented initiatives for digitizing. This paper is part of Special Issue: Industry 4.0 in firms, clusters and regions: the new digital imperative of Competitiveness Review, which features eight (8) papers and a Guest Editorial on “Industry 4.0 in firms, clusters and regions: the new digital imperative”. This special issue is free to access from 28th November 2021 until 1st January 2022.

Toward a Green Mobility Future: Drivers for Growth and Ontario’s Strengths

OVIN
Despite the tangible progress of electric vehicle (EV) adoption worldwide over the past decade, it is still considered in its infancy. To start to reap the benefits of green mobility, the number of EVs on roads has to surpass that of the conventional fossil fuel vehicles. To achieve this, many steps have to be taken and several factors to be considered by all the players of the automotive and mobility ecosystem, including governments, industry, and researchers. This report focuses on driving attention to the major drivers for growth to be considered for significantly elevating the adoption of EVs. The authors discuss the role of governments, OEMs, and utility companies in growing EV development and adoption. They also shed light on the major strengths of Ontario as a global leader and partner toward reaching a green mobility future.

Statistics

Measuring Tax Support for R&D and Innovation

OECD
On 9 December 2021 the OECD released the 2021 edition of its R&D Tax Incentives database, accompanied by a series of R&D tax incentive country profiles (including Canada’s profile) and the OECD R&D tax incentives database report. These updates provide the most up-to-date information on the role of R&D tax incentives in the innovation policy mix across 38 OECD countries and 11 partner economies, showcasing indicators and policy design features about expenditure-based R&D tax incentives, based on data collected from national officials through the 2021 OECD R&D tax incentives survey.

Narwhal Project Canadian accelerator ranking shows need for improvement compared to US counterparts

Meagan Simpson, Betakit
The Narwhal Project has created a new index ranking Canada’s accelerators. The list includes 21 Canadian accelerators, incubators, and entrepreneurial programs, ranking them based on data collected through Crunchbase in the summer of 2021. The Narwhal Project creator, Charles Plant, argues the data shows growth in the Canadian tech ecosystem over the past decade, as well as room for improvement, especially when compared to United States counterparts. Topping the list is Creative Destruction Labs (CDL), featuring the largest number of participants (751), as well as the highest number to have successfully raised capital. Circling out the top five are Startup Edmonton, TandemLaunch, MEDTEQ+, and Ecofuel.

Innovation Policy

SME digitalisation to “Build Back Better” – Digital for SMEs (D4SME) policy paper

OECD
This policy paper aims to improve understanding on how SMEs responded to the COVID-19 crisis and adapted to the new environment, and how different players in their ecosystems are contributing to their digital transition. The first part of the paper sets the scene on the digital transformation of SMEs, by providing an overview of key trends in SME uptake of digital technologies across OECD countries. The second part of the paper focuses on some of the main trends emerging from – or being strongly accelerated by – the COVID-19 crisis, including access to digital infrastructure, e-commerce and teleworking. The third and last section discusses international practices in SME digitalisation policies and presents original evidence from the “rescue” and “recovery” packages launched by OECD governments to face the crisis; as well as case studies and qualitative evidence from private-sector program provided by partners of the Digital for SMEs Global Initiative (D4SME).

Making Industrial Policy Work for Decarbonization

Jonas Meckling, Global Environmental Politics
Industrial policy has begun to move into the center of debates on climate policy. This represents a shift away from climate policy as we know it—as classic environmental policy. Industrial policy and environmental policy differ in their policy goals, policy instruments, and distributional effects, one primarily concerned with economic development, the other with cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This raises questions about policy interactions between industrial and environmental policy in broader climate policy mixes and how these affect global decarbonization. This article identifies complementary and conflictual dynamics between industrial policy and environmental policy in both domestic and international climate politics. It shows how green industrial policy can advance climate goals and cooperation but can also present challenges to deepening climate cooperation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Developing an understanding of policy interactions is central to leveraging the potential of industrial policy to accelerate global decarbonization.

Policy Digest

Into the Scale-up-verse: Exploring the landscape of Canada’s high-performing firms

Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship
Scale-ups, or high-growth firms, are responsible for the vast majority of productivity growth in Canada, making them an immensely powerful tool in the pursuit of Canada’s long-term economic stability and prosperity. However, only 1 in 100 young firms reach scale-up status within their first ten years. How can we harness, support, and amplify the power of scale-ups and their contributions to the Canadian economy?

A collaboration between the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship, this new study, Into the Scale-up-verse, takes the first step toward better equipping policymakers to support the success of Canadian firms by unpacking the complexity and nuance in Canada’s diverse scale-up universe. The research was initiated and funded by Delvinia in partnership with Mitacs and the IPL, and conducted with BII&E.  The report analyzes the most recent and detailed data set concerning Canadian business dynamics to provide a novel and comprehensive guide for those in a position—such as academic researchers, industry players, and government policymakers—to design supportive economic policy and facilitate productive conversations about Canada’s scale-ups.

Among the findings in the report, we identify key themes that best summarize what we now know about scale-ups in Canada:

  • Productivity: With high-growth firms in many industries experiencing productivity growth in excess of 25% in a single year, there is little doubt that scale-ups are an integral part of Canada’s long-term economic sustainability.
  • Employment: Scale-ups are leading contributors to increased employment and job quality in Canada. Scale-ups employ ten times the number of people compared to non-scale-ups, and average pay at scale-ups exceeds non-scale-ups across almost all industries and economic regions of Canada.
  • Innovation: Declining investment in R&D poses a risk to scale-ups reaching their full potential. Although scale-ups are more likely than non-scale-ups to spend on research and development—a key driver of firm growth and sustainability—overall R+D investment is stagnating.
  • Exporting: Scale-ups are five to ten times more likely to export than non-scale-ups and successfully exporting is a sure sign that a firm has raised their growth ceiling, expanded their market reach, and bolstered their organizational sophistication.
  • Economic Policy: Scale-ups are too diverse and complex for a “one size fits all” policy approach. Using new and comprehensive insights into the three ways scale-ups are defined and measured, policymaking can now apply a more targeted approach to supporting the success of different types of high-growth firms, their behaviours, and contributions.

Links to recent IPL webinars

From Science to Entrepreneurship

This is a recording of the Nov. 15th, 2021 webinar. There is a plethora of research on university commercialization and technology transfer. However, there is less of a discussion on the skillset and technical capabilities that allow a scientist to become an entrepreneur. In this webinar we will focus on these skills and programs that induce entrepreneurship. Moving from the scientist’s lab, to entrepreneurship courses, to forming a startup, to growing the firm within an incubator or accelerator.

Speakers:

  • Fabiano Armellini, Associate Professor Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal
  • Shiri M. Breznitz, Director, Master of Global Affairs Program; Associate Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
  • Elicia Maine, W.J. VanDusen Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Academic Director, Invention to Innovation (i2I); Special Advisor on Innovation to the VPRI, Simon Fraser University
  • Sophie Veilleux, Professor, Department of Management of the Faculty of Business Administration at Université Laval
  • Sarah Lubik (moderator), Director of Entrepreneurship; Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurship@SFU Lecturer, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University

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

Events

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.

P4IE 2022 International Conference Measuring Metrics that Matter

May 9-11 2022, Ottawa and Online
How to best design innovation indicators for the future? You are invited to contribute to this challenging question during our second international conference on “Policies, Processes and Practices for Performance of Innovation Ecosystems” (P4IE). The hybrid conference will be held online and in-person at Ottawa. You can actively participate by submitting an academic, industry or public policy paper. Topics includes, but are not limited to: New/Real-time innovation indicators; Sustainable, Inclusive, Responsible (SIR) innovation indicators; Measuring the performance of innovation ecosystems; and Science-to-innovation SIR innovation indicators. Submissions of academic extended abstracts due by December 13, 2021 (acceptance notification by February 15). Submissions of policy papers due by January 14, 2022 (acceptance notification by February 14). Submissions of industrial papers due by February 14, 2022 (acceptance notification by March 14).

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This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe