As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we solicited this opinion piece from the dean of Ottawa’s technology sector, Denzil Doyle. We welcome comments on Denzil’s commentary.
By Denzil Doyle
Anyone who is involved in high technology in Canada would have to agree that the country has a very strong R&D lobby. Politicians and policy makers are bombarded with messages from both industry and academia on a daily basis saying that we need more of it, even though our incentives for doing it are already among the best in the world. And everyone in the debate is frustrated because they know that we are not getting the appropriate economic results from the R&D we are doing. As evidence, they point out that our economy is still too dependent on the sale of raw materials like lumber and minerals and that most of the technology that is developed for those activities tends to get developed elsewhere. They argue that if we were better at innovating, economic diversification would be automatic. And there is a broad consensus that R&D is the engine of innovation.
But a closer look at those incentives will reveal that they may be a little too focused on R&D and not enough on other things that go into the commercialization mix, like marketing (and particularly market research), selling, raising risk capital, and product management. The country’s two most popular incentive programs are NRC’s IRAP and SR&ED, but in order to use them effectively, a company must have a pool of its own cash to perform the other functions. And that money is hard to come by.
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This is the 15th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
How much should government intervene in the process of innovation and commercialization? In a truly entrepreneurial culture that has healthy risk tolerance, one could argue that the government doesn’t need to play any substantial role at all. Entrepreneurs worthy of that title just get out there and do what they must to succeed.
In his book, The Way Ahead: Meeting Canada’s Productivity Challenge, Tom Brzustowski, RBC professor for the commercialization of innovation at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, wrote, “I believe that it is only the private sector that creates wealth.” The public sector, on the other hand, is a consumer of wealth in order to bankroll the two fundamental roles it plays.
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This is the 14th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“If Canadians were as good at innovating as we are at explaining why we’re bad at it, Canada wouldn’t rank 14th among industrialized nations in the Conference Board of Canada’s report card on innovation. And because innovation is the key to improving productivity, we wouldn’t be earning $7,000 less a person each year than Americans.”
That blunt comment came courtesy of none other than Conference Board president and CEO Anne Golden in an editorial published last August in the Globe and Mail titled “Canada’s innovation malaise: The cure’s in our culture.”
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This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
In my first posting, I promised that this blog would investigate how human evolution has impacted the way we do business, why we are the way we are, and why we act and feel the way we do in our personal and business lives. When it comes to evolution, two areas of investigation are of interest: first, the evolution of the human brain as it relates to how we make decisions, and second, how and why we like to live and operate in tribes.
A few weeks ago a Globe and Mail column by Margaret Wente, The Amygdala Election, provided an eloquent discussion of both phenomena visibly on display in the current Canadian federal election.
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By Linda Forrest
One thing you can rely on in the media game is change. The media industry, as ever, has been aflutter this past week as trade publications both in North America and Europe either swallowed whole their counterparts in a high-profile merging of brands, or print editions of long-standing B2B trade publications announced their intentions of moving strictly online. In reaction, many proclaimed, once again, the death of the trade magazine.
There are various perspectives on why these shifts in the magazine world are taking place, including this detailed piece, written in a funerary tone, from Adweek’s editorial director and longtime prominent media figure, Michael Wolff. Meanwhile, as quoted in a Guardian piece that questions whether trade magazines have a shelf life,
David Levin, United Business Media chief executive, draws a comparison between the situation the trade press finds itself in today and 1912, “when there were a lot of blacksmiths about and we were about to get the motor car.”
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By Denzil Doyle
