The IPL newsletter: Volume 24, Issue 486

MEDIA

Do you miss your BlackBerry? Canada's innovation sector does too

Peter Armstrong, CBC
This article features commentary by IPL Co-Director Dan Breznitz on Canada's innovation policy. The article situates the discussion with reference to the recent film BlackBerry. The article notes that while "the rise of BlackBerry showed Canada is as well placed as any country on earth to build and engineer new technologies...when they eventually failed, there was no system in place to support the ideas, and the work that was still being done."

RESEARCH

New Path Development in a Semi-peripheral Auto Region: The Case of Ontario

The Political Economy of Energy Transitions in Canada: Implications for the Auto Industry

David A. Wolfe and Nathan Lemphers, IPL Working Paper 2023-02
This chapter explores the broader implications of the current energy transition from a carbon-based energy paradigm to one based on decarbonized energy sources for the automotive and broader transportation sector. This transition carries grave implications for two of Canada’s leading economic sectors — automotive and oil and gas — two of the sectors that will be most directly affected by the prospective transition. The chapter focuses on the two provinces most directly affected by this transition — Ontario and Alberta — but also explores the implications for Québec. Ontario’s automotive sector is on the cusp of a major restructuring that will determine whether it continues to enjoy the status of a semi-peripheral automotive region it has held since the mid-1960s under the Auto Pact and the successor North American trade agreements, or whether it follows the steady path of decline that it has experienced since the early 2000s (Mordue and Sweeney 2020; 2017; Anastakis 2013). While this restructuring most directly implicates Ontario’s manufacturing sector, the energy shift creates broader implications for the political economy of the Canadian federation through its impact on the provincial economies of Alberta and Québec, given that energy products and motor vehicles combined accounted for 37 per cent of Canada’s total exports in 2020. The Ontario and Alberta economies, based as they are on manufacturing and resources, have long been viewed as representing antithetical interests, particularly since the OPEC price revolution of the 1970s (Simeon and Robinson 1990, 236–249). In contrast, we argue that, since the late 1940s, the two provinces have been equally locked into the “carbon trap” in terms of the mutual dependence of their primary economic sectors on the production and consumption of carbon-based energy (Haley 2011). Consequently, they face similar challenges in restructuring their economic base in the coming transition to decarbonized energy sources and electrified transportation.

Incubating Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Regional Innovation Centres and Civic Capital in Ottawa, Toronto, and Waterloo

Alessandra Cicci, Darius Ornston, and Lisa Huh, IPL Working Paper 2023-01
A growing literature argues that entrepreneurial ecosystems benefit from intermediary organizations which increase civic capital or connectivity among entrepreneurs, risk capital, knowledge-bearing institutions, sophisticated customers, and complementary service providers. These intermediary organizations, however, are seldom subjected to comparative analysis. Focusing on three regional innovation centres in Waterloo (Communitech), Toronto (MaRS), and Ottawa (OCRI, now Invest Ottawa), we find that all three organizations fostered greater connectivity within their communities, but that they did so in very different ways. Distinguishing among entrepreneur-led “community creators,” institution-led “buzz builders,” and anchor-led “cluster organizers,” we demonstrate how institutional origins and organizational design shape their programming choices and, by extension, the structure of civic capital. While the differences among Communitech, MaRS, and Invest Ottawa have narrowed over time, this analysis suggests that organizations seeking to improve connectivity in immature, entrepreneurial ecosystems face important tradeoffs.

Promoting Inclusive Innovation for People With Disabilities: Who Does What and Why?

Dan Breznitz & Amos Zehavi, Disability and Society
Disability policy is often characterized as comprising three different components: citizenship rights, labor market integration and social protection. This study presents a fourth component – disability-related innovation. Specifically it analyzes two critical interrelated questions: what governments do to guide innovation in this area; and do patterns of greater government disability policy involvement in social-democratic welfare states apply in the case of innovation? Utilizing a qualitative comparison of Germany, Israel, Sweden and the United States, it finds that while policy across all countries is at first glance decisively similar, the important differences that exist cannot be satisfactorily explained within the classical welfare state typology framework. Countries that are leaders in terms of social support for disabled people – Germany and Sweden – are not necessarily leaders in disability-related innovation. This is particularly noticeable in the case of programs for support of Assistive Technology development.

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. The article begins 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, it provides 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.