Why Canada needs a post-pandemic prosperity strategy
We can’t wait to prioritize the innovation economy — it has
to happen now.
Authored for NACO Academy Magazine by Benjamin Bergen, Executive Director of the Council of Canadian Innovators, a national business council led by the CEOs of Canada’s fastest growing technology firms.
It’s easy to be a pessimist these days. We have now been slogging through the turmoil, strain and heartache of a global pandemic for more than a year — long enough to grind anybody down. But by their very nature, innovators are optimists. We don’t accept the world as it is today. We insist that it can be better, and when we see problems, we work to make it better by building the solutions.
Innovators have helped carry us through COVID-19. E-commerce, cloud computing and an array of other technologies have saved countless lives by allowing us to continue working in our socially distanced reality. What’s more, innovative, cutting-edge techniques allowed us to develop vaccines at breakneck speed. As we look toward putting COVID-19 behind us, our world will only be more data-driven and technology-infused, and when the post-pandemic recovery comes, we can be sure that it will be led by innovative companies. There’s no guarantee, though, that Canada will enjoy the full benefit of this economic boom. If we aren’t engaged and proactive, Canada can’t expect to claim its share of the global knowledge economy. If we don’t put the right policies in place to support homegrown Canadian innovators, there is a very real possibility that Canada will be left buying technologies and services from the countries that get it right, and we will all be poorer for it.
A thriving innovation economy is an ecosystem, and everything is interconnected — high-growth scale-ups, emerging startups, established players, research institutions, venture capitalists, angel investors and public policy experts. A growing, prosperous ecosystem creates wealth in terms of equity and intangible assets, which get invested back into the ecosystem, driving the next generation of growth. This growth also creates public wealth in the form of taxes, which help pay for the social services we all value as Canadians.
“We currently have an innovation sector where there are lots of startups, but a lack of access to capital and customers.”
For the ecosystem to truly thrive, we need three key ingredients: access to highly skilled talent, access to growth capital and access to customers. Frankly, as a country, we can be doing better on all three.
We currently have an innovation sector where there are lots of startups, but a lack of access to capital and customers means that too often our most promising companies are bought up or snuffed out before they can scale into the tentpole companies that support the ecosystem. Because of this unhealthy dynamic, our most talented workers too often leave for other, more exciting innovation centres, which only exacerbates the problem.
Canadians have the ingenuity and education to lead the world, and we have more promising technology firms than most people are aware of. The opportunity is enormous, and nobody should be sitting on the sidelines. Creating an innovation ecosystem is something that we should all be working toward — universities supporting research commercialization, cities creating the opportunity for urban innovations, entrepreneurs creating new businesses built on the latest technology and investors injecting capital to support growth. The most successful jurisdictions have leaders who engage with the private sector to understand the pain points, and work to find solutions.
We can’t expect our government to do everything, but the knowledge economy isn’t an arena where laissez-faire capitalism works either. After all, the most valuable intangible assets such as patents and trademarks only exist because they are created in law. In this context, the most successful innovation economies have managed to forge a strong, sophisticated public-private dialogue, with all the key players pulling in the same direction. Canada recently ranked 21st in the 2021 Bloomberg Innovation Index. That won’t be good enough if we want to get the most out of the post-pandemic recovery.
Our country needs a prosperity plan that prioritizes the innovation economy, with an eye to ensuring the success of our homegrown companies. If we get it right, in the next few years we will see an economic boom that will create wealth for Canadians, and drive tax revenue to pay for the public services we all value, after a period of historic deficits. We all need to be putting plans in place today, so we don’t miss this unique opportunity. This can’t wait.
– Thanks to Benjamin Bergen for sharing his insights.
