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When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.

The R&D focus should be on industry clusters that can leverage the country's natural resource wealth and traditional strengths. Think energy, water, agriculture, forestry, mining and manufacturing that serves vital Canadian needs.

In areas most closely linked to innovation, the progress is equally slow. Mr. Wilson, for example, urged Ottawa to look at creating tax incentives to encourage venture capital and speeding up the commercialization of intellectual property developed in universities.

The to-do list on the path achieving that objective is long. There's overhauling the Investment Canada and Competition acts, opening up the telecom and broadcast industries to more foreign competition, creating a national securities regulator, reforming copyright laws, eliminating remaining internal trade barriers and lowering personal income tax rates.

It may mean that government plays a larger role in some industries while leaving others to their own devices. That, at least, is how other similarly sized economies successfully leverage limited government funds.More study has become an excuse to put off these much tougher, but inevitable, choices.