There is a whole lot of talk about what Canada needs to do to improve in the innovation arena. The Conference Board of Canada has come out with their latest assessment which is available on line at:
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Innovation
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Couldn’t find a written report on the site only web based and interestingly enough there are a few YouTube videos. The hue and cry is that Canada must have a national innovation strategy. How typical of the Conference Board of Canada to have such a myopic view on innovation.
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Natural ecosystems and innovation ecosystems have a whole lot in common. First a bit about natural ecosystems and the tree planting analogy. A friend of mine was a junior ranger back in high school and his primary function as a junior ranger was to reforest areas that were clear cut. The junior rangers would plant seedlings in the de-forested areas. After many years of doing this they found that seedlings indigenous to the local area actually took far better than those imported and replanted from areas far away. The rationale was that the local seedlings were acclimatized to the area, soil and weather.
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This is similar to facilitating innovation ecosystems. If you try and transplant and start a system from scratch you will likely be far less productive than if you facilitate what already exists locally, much like local saplings does better in their native environment. For example there is a movement afoot to bring a clean tech cluster to Ottawa. That all sounds well and good, however, there is little in the way of local talent to leverage and the type of skills for this sort of endeavour, at least in my opinion are absent. Try to set up a cluster like this in Calgary or Edmonton and there is already a strong ecosystem already with adjacent skill sets and the probability of success is greatly improved. There is, however, in Ottawa an incredibly rich and deep talent pool in the open source software arena, which is a prime motivator in setting up TheCodeFactory.
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Innovation is highly regionally based, and therefore when setting up these regional networks you really need to understand what already exists. If you are going to develop a national innovation strategy you really need to do an assessment of all of the village ecosystems in the nation. Develop strategies that facilitate existing excellence in these centres and then find ways to accelerate the rate of development in the local ecosystems and potential synergies between these areas. There isn’t one all encompassing national strategy for innovation rather finding a way to knit like groups together.
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In my opinion the shortest path to innovation improvement is to build on excellence one village at a time then find ways to knit it together. The hollowness of the cry for a national innovation strategy is deafening.
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Ian Graham

Filed under: Commercialization, Innovation by Ian
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