Q&A with Bruce Good, Executive Director, the Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Business Innovation
In your view, is there an innovation gap in Canada?
It's not so much an innovation gap in terms of creativity, thinking and science. Canadians have a good sense and a good history there, and a lot of institutions support that endeavour. But innovation is sometimes thought of as R&D in this country, when in fact research is really just the transformation of money into knowledge. Innovation, on the other hand, is about the transformation of ideas and knowledge into value, whether that's social or economic. That's where we're struggling: with the ability to commercialize those innovations.
How is our performance on a global scale?
The Conference Board has long been submitting data for the Global Competitive Index produced by the World Economic Forum. Over the last four years, Canada's overall ranking has been dropping. Currently, we are ranked 15th on overall competitiveness among 144 participating countries.
That competitiveness is broken into three key categories. The first looks at basic requirements, including health, primary education, institutions and infrastructure. Here we're ranked 18th. The second component concerns what we call "efficiency enhancers," which help create opportunities for boosting competitiveness, like market efficiency, higher education and training. We rank sixth for enhancers. The third area is about innovation and business sophistication. This is the third leg holding up the stool, and it's an important one – we're ranking a weak 24th.
"Let's just say some people are happy with being ranked 15th; the Conference Board is not. I don't think any Canadian should be, especially when our trading partners are all in the top 10."
Q&A with Bruce Good
Executive Director at the Conference Board of Canada's Centre for Business Innovation
What are Canada's strengths?
We've got a pretty good history around patents and applications. We also have some good industry-university collaboration occurring. Quite frankly, the quality of our scientific research institutions is right up there, as well as the availability of scientists and engineers. These are all key ingredients to successful innovation.
What are we struggling with?
There are a couple of gaps that really stand out. Government procurement of new and early-stage innovation or advanced technology is the most concerning. Other countries spend more on this. The U.K., for example, has programs that provide the opportunity for innovation to be supported by government and grounded in the country first before it can grow outside. We rank 48th on government procurement – that's an area that needs to be addressed.
The second area relates to capacity, and I refer to it as management. It's about knowing where you are today, where you want to be in the future and how you can get there.
Where do you see the greatest opportunities for improvement?
In management. We just did a survey of 1,000 companies across the country in multiple industries with a great cross-section of both mature and early-stage companies. We looked at a couple of basic elements: Do you have a structured innovation process, with ownership, executive ownership, timelines, critical path, et cetera? We found that only 30 per cent of the firms that responded had one. Those that did – this is the good news – performed 30 per cent better than average.
Secondly, do you have a management process around innovation in place? Fifty-one per cent of the firms didn't have one. Those that did, again, had a 30 per cent performance improvement over the average.
Are there other notable gaps?
We found that 40 per cent of the firms were not using metrics at all. When I refer to metrics, I'm looking at tools and/or measurements that are used inside the firm to measure innovation activity, similar to the way you'd measure inventory, goods and services, and so on. There are great tools available for measuring innovation.
What about skills?
We have a lot of innovation skills in this country, things like creativity and problem-solving, risk assessment and so on. But we learned that we lack commercialization skills, such as business-management skills, capital-raising skills, collaboration and networking skills, as well as basic sales and marketing, and negotiating. Those are critical for commercializing innovation.
What do you take away from those findings?
It's not good enough just to invest time in innovation. If you don't have the process and the measurements in place, you're actually doing yourself a disservice because you will underperform.
What can be done?
As a result of this research, we've designed a new tool – a capacity assessment tool. It can assess a firm's capacity. We believe that knowing where you are can enable you to move forward. We've also created a new Centre for Business Innovation where we're sharing this kind of material.
Innovation, as I said, is about creating value, both economic and social. It's our future, and it's not just in the lab – it's across all processes in the organization, from HR to accounting, to the shop floor, the marketing department. I think it needs to become part of the management culture that you're continuously asking the right questions about innovation inside the firm.
Let's just say some people are happy with being ranked 15th; the Conference Board is not. I don't think any Canadian should be, especially when our trading partners are all in the top 10. We've got to get there.
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