Supporting Business Growth through Collaborative Innovation

The postpandemic recovery requires businesses to innovate, to create products and services for global markets while supporting workforce education and training to ensure employees remain at the forefront of business innovation and economic transition.

A series of articles in the Globe and Mail outline Canada's innovation policy and the context in which research and development (R&D) operates as a pipeline for innovation. The first article outlines the work to stand up the Canadian Innovation and Investment Agency. Many good points are raised about the need for clarity of purpose, but I would sum up the issue as a historical inability to differentiate R&D from innovation. Canada is the G7's highest per capita funder of research in the public sector and the lowest for business R&D. Compounding this is the fact that Canadian companies underinvest in education and training and new technology adoption. This is the three-legged stool of innovation and productivity.

The second article outlines the Artificial Intelligence strategy deployed by Ottawa over the past several years. The challenge here is again the over-reliance on basic research, to the detriment to applied research, and most importantly, experimental development. As I have said before: 

This continuum matters. A lot:

The continuum from basic and applied research through to experimental development constitutes the types of activities that make up the innovation carrying capacity of national economies: the ability to proactively create value from public investments in basic research by fostering private sector receptivity and engagement to the public S&T systems.

The third article in the series offers a clickbait title that detracts from the main issues: the need to increase business R&D as well as receptor capacity in Canadian businesses for innovation and Intellectual Property (IP). This includes not just products (which are easy to patent), but also other forms of IP.

The Expert Panel on Intellectual Property Report: Intellectual Property inOntario’s Innovation Ecosystem outlines 13 types of IP that are essential and important to the intangibles economy. We can add to this things like startups, software, databases, policies, traditional knowledge, practices and positions. A commitment to inclusive innovation means acknowledging that there are many types of IP being commercialized, by many types of people running many types of businesses. 

The bottom line here is that it is good to see innovation policy front and centre, it's just too bad that these reports did not unpack many important and related issues: diversity of actors, inputs and outputs; receptor capacity for supporting R&D and IP commercialization; and the role of reskilling for innovation to name just a few (check out two recent reports on the innovation literacy angle - one from Mitacs and the other from the Future Skills Centre). 

There are 440,000 small companies, 9,000 medium sized companies, and fewer than 2,000 large companies in Ontario. Not enough of these companies currently perform research and development (R&D). The most reliable indicator we have for R&D performing companies is from the SR&ED tax rebate program; currently only 2% of companies in Canada file SR&ED claims. The lack of R&D performance is clearly linked to lacklustre economic competitiveness.

Small companies that do R&D are more likely to survive and grow, hire more people, export more goods and services, and have a bigger economic impact in their communities. Startups, new companies, and small companies that are seeking to join the global economy in key sectors like health, IT, manufacturing and automotive – they need help finding supports to conduct R&D. The potential here is vast.

This is why we have built the Ontario Collaborative Innovation Platform. By working together the entire Ontario higher education system is able to help support the transit of IP - from idea to invoice.

The skills that are in high demand are those most difficult to teach online

Global pandemic planning has led to emphasis on online learning to ensure that students can continue to learn and finish the current term. But maker skills, which are now more than ever in demand, are the most difficult to teach online. This conundrum underlies the transition to a new, social-distancing normal.

The current crisis has amplified a downside of globalization: the interconnectivity of market production has for the past several decades led to the hollowing out of manufacturing capability. Since the early years of the last decade there have been calls for and moves toward a reshoring of manufacturing--largely a result of a lack of jobs and the social risks of insufficient employment for large swathes of the population. This in turn has led to a commensurate focus on the skills and competencies associated with being able to build and make things. And herein lies the main irony of where we are in education: the skills that are in high demand are those most difficult to teach online.

As the global community starts to grasp the magnitude of the challenges we are collectively facing those of us in universities and colleges are starting to plan for unknown event horizons, including when to restart in-person instruction. While it is not feasible to think that whole societies can remain in socially distant quasi-isolation indefinitely, we are witnessing a wholesale move towards more online, distributed, or flexible teaching and learning. This means thinking through how we can translate educational outcomes adapted for distributed teaching and learning. It also means figuring how we might prioritize programming to account for and accommodate those whose programs have been disrupted. We'll need to work out the best means to stage online back into in-person engagements, and to adapt in situ learning to the inevitable new guidelines or rules around social distancing.

Throughout this it occurs to me that those same goals of globalization--of distributing the means of production to lower cost regions--has led to precisely some of the problems we face in online education. Everything from engineering to design to health care will have to adapt in the short term, which may lead to positive changes over the long term. Now is the time to focus on how effective pedagogy can drive the use of any technology, and to heed the decades of research into teaching and learning, particularly as mediated through technologies like the Internet.

Who reads labour market reports?

A huge congratulations to the Diversity Institute's Wendy Cukier and all at Ryerson University for yesterday's announcement of the launch of the Future Skills Centre. This is a significant step forward in Canada's capacity to ensure that all can find meaningful careers and make contributions to society.

Gladys Okine, Executive Director, First Work: Ontario’s Youth Employment Network and member of the Future Skills Council spoke at the event. She made one of the more salient points when she said that students and job seekers do not read labour market reports; what is needed is easily translatable information and support to help Canadians understand what skills and competencies they need to find meaningful employment. 

This is an important point. Demystifying how we can best prepare young people to enter the labour market, and help those who want or need to pivot within careers, is a key step in building a resilient social, cultural and economic society. I look forward to supporting Ryerson and their partners in this important project.

This is Research at OCAD University

Check out our new poster campaign: This is Research at OCAD University - and see the breadth and depth of research OCADU faculty are undertaking. From the visual to the virtual, and the prototypical to the physical, each poster shows how our faculty are engaging with new forms of knowledge, materials and ideas at the forefront of research and creative practice. And, importantly, they demonstrate to our publics, our students and our partners, the value of ideation, exploration, knowledge and artistic creation.

https://www2.ocadu.ca/news/this-is-research

The Logic of Inclusive Innovation: From Inputs to Outcomes

The Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) 2018 edition was held in Ottawa recently and featured an excellent array of speakers focused on Building Bridges Between Science, Policy and Society. I had the good fortune to attend and also to convene a panel of experts on the topic of inclusive innovation:

• Dori Tunstall, Dean of Design, OCAD University, on BIPOC entrepreneurship (and Black Panther!)
• Malavika Kumaran, Senior Associate, Research, MaRS Data Catalyst, on women in tech
• Ken Doyle, Executive Director of TechAccess Canada on later-stage R&D and diversity of activity
• Dominique Bérubé, Vice-President, Research Programs, SSHRC will address the role of humanities and social sciences in addressing grand challenges and multidisciplinary research.

In order to achieve inclusive innovation, we need to ensure that the inputs, activities and outputs are inclusive. When we do so, we leverage the full spectrum of capacity from across society, and help to build more resilient social, cultural and economic outcomes.

Here is the summary of our panel:

What is inclusive innovation? How do we achieve it?

These are important questions to ask as we continue to pivot into a knowledge based global economy. Inclusive innovation is a worthy outcome to strive for. But in order to achieve it, we need to ensure that the inputs are inclusive. We can usefully plot this into a logic model, which provides a way for understanding the relationships between the various inputs, activities and outputs that will help us achieve the outcome(s) commensurate with the focus on inclusive innovation.

When we look at innovation through this lens and work back from the goal of inclusive innovation we can see that there are gaps in the material conditions that would support the outcome of inclusive innovation. Innovation inputs usefully include the pipeline of science and technology and research and development (S&T and R&D), funding, people, culture, activities: those conditions and material supports that are put into play against any innovation effort. For the purposes of our logic model we can usefully who is involved in innovation, what do they do, and what happens as a result.

·      Actors: ensuring that decolonization, diversity and equity lens is applied to all people engaging in innovation related activities – we want to ensure that the inputs to innovation are inclusive. 

·      Activities: what activities are prioritized? We need to focus on diverse activities across the span of research and development (R&D), the disciplines needed to stand up multidisciplinary effort, and the complementary skills and competencies needed to realize outputs and outcomes.

·      Outputs: what is produced that will reflect diverse inputs? What happens if we only count what is easy to count? The OECD’s innovation categories are useful here.

·      Outcomes: an inclusive society with a growth-focused economy in a global environment.

Understanding each of these in turn will help us rethink how we approach innovation, what activities we prioritize and why, and what outputs and outcomes we can expect to see.

Innovation Actors

By ensuring that we support decolonization, diversity and equity we can help to create the conditions for inclusive innovation. This means ensuring that we have gender diversity and parity, and equal representation from diverse cultural groups, in order to ensure that we have equal representation on the inputs and ideas that promote and formulate innovation. The historical conditions that have created baked-in biases have resulted in a politics of exclusion that we are only recently starting to unpack. Calling for inclusive innovation compels us to engage in decolonizing our approach to social inclusion. We can ensure that everyone can access education and therefore be a full, equal and meaningful participant in innovation activities.

Innovation Activities

Innovation activities also benefit from a variety of skills and competencies. These are most often utilized and deployed in concert with complementary skills, disciplines, points of view. To achieve inclusive innovation we must see the actors not only through a diversity and equity lens, but also diversity in the skills, competencies, disciplines, and credentials required at each step in the innovation process.

The activities of innovation also assume a balanced approach across the spectrum of research – from Basic Research, through Applied Research and Experimental Development.^[1] Complementarity across the spectrum of S&T and R&D requires innovation systems to leverage multiple points of contact in order to achieve innovation outcomes, including those disciplines and activities in the experimental development end of the spectrum.

Innovation Outputs

The full spectrum of innovation defined by the OECD includes product, process, organizational and marketing innovation. Each of these represents a key set of social, cultural and economic indicators, with assumed activities and outputs:

1. Product innovation: A good or service that is new or significantly improved. This includes significant improvements in technical specifications, components and materials, software in the product, user friendliness or other functional characteristics.
2. Process innovation: A new or significantly improved production or delivery method. This includes significant changes in techniques, equipment and/or software.
3. Marketing innovation: A new marketing method involving significant changes in product design or packaging, product placement, product promotion or pricing.
4. Organisational innovation: A new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations. [2]

The types of activities are contingent on the innovation category. In a recent op-ed Beckton, Irvine and McDonald state that “mainstream networks, incubators and accelerators often don't cater to female entrepreneurs and the industries in which they operate”, which compounds another issue they identify related to innovation outputs: “a marketplace where key participants still tend to define innovation in terms of technology and goods. The result is a situation where innovations that flow from other parts of the marketplace – innovations often created by women running service companies – are not seen in a similar, positive light.”[3] This is an important point.

Innovation Outcomes

Inclusive innovation means focusing not just on simple to count measures such as patents and publications, but on the full spectrum of innovation outputs.

·      We need to ask: whose perspective has been left out of innovation?

·      What activities and disciplines are needed to facilitate innovation?

·      What outputs result from these inputs?

When we look at innovation through this lens and work back from the goal of inclusive innovation we can see that there are gaps in the material conditions that would support the outcome of inclusive innovation.

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[1] OECD Frascati Manual 2.1.64. See http://www.oecd.org/sti/inno/Frascati-Manual.htm. The OECD uses the terms Science and Technology (how national governments understand the public production of knowledge) and Industrial Research and Development (how national governments understand private sector R&D and innovation related activities.

[2] https://www.oecd.org/site/innovationstrategy/defininginnovation.htm

[3] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/women-entrepreneurs-are-innovating-in-their-businesses-its-time-to-help-them-succeed/article38054681/