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Canadians have reached top tier global performance in reading, mathematics, problem solving and science, and Canada has rising numbers of graduates with doctoral degrees in science and engineering.

This valuable resource of highly qualified and skilled individuals needs to be better leveraged.

The ease and ability of the academic community to collaborate, including through research networks, is also well-recognized.

to develop technologies, products and services that add value and create high-paying jobs.

Canada has an impressive record when it comes to research and the quality of its knowledge base.

Still, the innovative performance of Canada's firms and the productivity growth continue to lag behind competing nations.

The government is also committed to moving forward with a new approach to promoting business innovation—one that emphasizes active business-led initiatives and focuses resources on better fostering the growth of innovative firms.

Achieving this requires the concerted effort of all players in the innovation system—to ensure each does what one does best and to leverage one another's strengths.

the government has invested more to support science, technology and innovative companies than ever before

Canada must become more innovative

providing a new framework to guide federal ST&I investments and priorities. That is why the Government of Canada stated its intention to release an updated ST&I Strategy in the October 2013 Speech from the Throne.

seeking the views of stakeholders from all sectors of the ST&I system—including universities, colleges and polytechnics, the business community, and Canadians

written submissions from all Canadians on the policy issues and questions presented in this paper.

The government remains focused on creating jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for Canadians

encouraging partnerships with industry, attracting highly skilled researchers, continuing investments in discovery-driven research, strengthening Canada's knowledge base, supporting research infrastructure and providing incentives to private sector innovation.

has transformed the National Research Council, doubled its investment

supported research collaborations through the federal granting councils

created the new Venture Capital Action Plan

helping to promote greater commercialization of research and development

Our country continues to lead the G7 in spending on R&D

Canada has a world-class post-secondary education system that embraces and successfully leverages collaboration with the private sector, particularly through research networks

destination for some of the world's brightest minds

global race

businesses that embrace innovation-based strategies

post-secondary and research institutions that attract and nurture highly qualified and skilled talent

researchers who push the frontiers of knowledge

governments that provide the support

low taxes, strong support for new businesses, a soundly regulated banking system, and ready availability of financial services

reducing red tape

expanding training partnerships and improving access to venture capital.

Collaboration is key to mobilizing innovation

invest in partnerships between businesses and colleges and universities

Economic Action Plans (EAP) 2012 and 2013

provide incentive for innovative activity in firms, improved access to venture capital, augmented and more coordinated direct support to firms, and deeper partnerships and connections between the public and private sectors.

the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society

As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.

America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.

For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.

an alarming trend

What is the role of technology in these developments?

a sweeping look at the relationship between innovation and productivity

New Economy of Personal Information

Power-Curve Society

the future of jobs

the report covers the social, policy and leadership implications of the “Power-Curve Society,”

World Wide Web

as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.

the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.

the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy

Economic and social insecurity is widespread.

major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.

Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful?

appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class

A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.

How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down?

Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?

many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored

what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?

The Innovation Economy

Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation

What drives innovation are new tools and then the use of those new tools in new ways.”

at least 50 percent of the acceleration of productivity over these years has been due to ICT

economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.

Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.

Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.

Others scholars

see innovation as going in cycles, not steady trajectories.

A conventional approach is to see innovation as a linear, exponential phenomenon

leads to gross errors

Atkinson

believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.

innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”

costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas

innovation costs are plummeting

Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.

we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”

what is meant by “innovation,”

“invention plus implementation.”

A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.

90 percent of innovation costs involve organizational capital,”

there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.

This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”

The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”

Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.

Institutions and social practice cannot keep up with the constant waves of new technologies

“We are moving into an era of constant instability,”

“and the half-life of a skill today is about five years.”

Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.

The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”

pace of innovation is a major story in our economy today.

The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform

tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices

standard

The App Economy illustrates the rapid, fluid speed of innovation in a networked environment

crowdsourcing model

winning submissions are

globally distributed in an absolute sense

problem-solving is a global, Long Tail phenomenon

As a technical matter, then, many of the legacy barriers to innovation are falling.

small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.

Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,

“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”

This notion of “permissionless innovation” is crucial,

“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite

barriers to further development exist from an intellectual property perspective

Inventors must also determine if they are in a position to efficiently seize the market opportunity.

regulatory considerations, reimbursement strategies, intellectual property, and business development objectives. This leads to Phase I of the development model.

R&D in Phase II is responsible for generating early concepts. Brainstorming sessions are often held during this stage of development with members of R&D, marketing, and physician consultants. Computational analyses, such as stress and flow studies, are conducted to further understand the behavior of a proposed device. The team often develops a 3D CAD model of a proposed device

We heard that the government should be more focussed on helping innovative firms to grow and, particularly, on serving the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

greater cooperation with provincial programs

innovation support is too narrowly focussed on R&D – more support is needed for other activities along the continuum from ideas to commercially useful innovation

more productive and internationally competitive economy

whole-of-government program delivery vehicle – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC)

SR&ED program should be simplified

includes non-labour costs, such as materials and capital equipment, the calculation of which can be highly complex

the base for the tax credit should be labour-related costs, and the tax credit rate should be adjusted upward

fund direct support measures for SMEs

promoting the growth of firms

facilitating access by such firms to an increased supply of risk capital at both the start-up and later stages of their growth.

building public–private research collaborations

National Research Council (NRC) should become independent collaborative research organizations

become affiliates of universities

create opportunity and demand for leading-edge goods

encouragement of innovation in the Canadian economy should become a stated objective of procurement policies and programs.

the government needs to establish business innovation as a whole-of-government priority

put innovation at the centre of the government's economic strategy

Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) – a body with a whole-of-government focus that would oversee the realization of our proposed action plan, as well as serve as a permanent mechanism to promote the refinement and improvement of the government's business innovation programs going forward.

focus resources where market forces are unlikely to operate effectively or efficiently and, in that context, address the full range of business innovation activities, including research, development, commercialization and collaboration with other key actors in the innovation ecosystem

the closer the activity being supported is to market, and therefore the more likely it is that the recipient firm will capture most of the benefit for itself.

specific sectors

of strategic importance

concentrated in particular regions

succeed in the arena of global competition

observation

A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.

not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,

“instead of researching the market, be the market”

businesses should be out there observing.

larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.

direct contact with customers.

move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us

not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves

lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach

a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing

work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.

either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!

energy efficient

long term

Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical

see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.

any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive

This is instinctive to businesses

Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance

much of business

have taken this to extremes

A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.

moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.

be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.

apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated

looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general

We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.

Where nature can perform particular functions

we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them

Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.

a shift towards renewable resources

The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.

The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.

looking at our work from a range of perspectives

wider context

keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.

being strategic is important too

ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.

This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.

allowing people to imagine different possibilities.

scenario planning

Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.

Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation

The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.

This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties

the notion that big is best needs to be challenged

new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.

more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience

have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.

not having all your eggs in one basket.

In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure

this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.

it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so

‘edge’

the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.

overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.

recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.

giving status to the marginal

It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.

Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.

Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.

be flexible, lean and adaptable

A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.

we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies

What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?

Digital

Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.

Trustless

don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority

Decentralized

Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.

Cryptographic

This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.

Identity

there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them

Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations

It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger

does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc

Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins

It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may

if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce

Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.

You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.

if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.

In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.