. . . Canada ranks second to last for the number of international trademarks filed per million population. Ten of seventeen comparator countries had at least twice Canada’s share of trademarks by population.
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Putting Innovation in context
Innovation is the ability to turn knowledge into new and improved goods and services. The indicators selected measure a country’s capacity to innovate by assessing its knowledge production, how that knowledge is transformed, and market shares of knowledge-based industries.
Countries with the highest overall scores have successfully developed national strategies around innovation, giving them a substantial lead over their peers in one or more areas. Ireland has seen enormous success as a host for leading innovative companies. The U.S. fosters a combination of top science and engineering faculties, broad and deep capital markets, and an entrepreneurial culture. Japan is committed to efficient manufacturing and new product development. Switzerland, the top-ranked country this year, is a leader in the pharmaceuticals industry.
A new indicator has been added this year:
Trademarks per million population. A trademark is a word, symbol, or design used to distinguish products or services from those of marketplace competitors.
1 Trademarks often represent novelty, are used in advertising, and are often associated with new products. Consequently, the number of new trademarks in a given year is an indicator of product and marketing innovations. Trademarks per million population is a useful indicator of innovation because it benchmarks services sector innovations and non-technological innovations not captured by data on patents.
How does Canada grade on Innovation?
Overall, Canada ranks 14th among the 17 countries on innovation and continues to be a “D” performer. To arrive at the overall grade on innovation, a total of 12 indicators are used to rank the countries by:
In the latest report card, Canada scores one “B,” 2 “C”s, and 9 “D”s—an improvement over the last report card, in which Canada earned only “C”s and “D”s. Canada is above the 17-country average on only two indicators: scientific articles and the export market share of the aerospace industry. On the trademarks indicator—which is new to this report card—Canada scores a “D” grade and ranks second to last. Canada’s lone “B” is on the scientific articles indicator, where it ranks 8th.
What does technology innovation in Canada look like?
Canada is well supplied with good universities, engineering schools, teaching hospitals, and technical institutes. It produces science that is well respected around the world. But, with some exceptions, Canada does not take the steps that other countries take to ensure that science is successfully commercialized and used as a source of advantage for innovative companies seeking global market share. Canadian companies are thus rarely at the leading edge of new technology and too often find themselves a generation or more behind the productivity growth achieved by global industry leaders.
Does it matter that Canada ranks so poorly?
Innovation is essential to a high-performing economy. It is also critical to environmental protection, a high-performing education system, a well-functioning system of health promotion and health care, and an inclusive society. Without innovation, all these systems stagnate and Canada’s performance deteriorates relative to that of its peers.
With new key players in the global economy such as China, India, and Brazil, Canadian businesses must move up the value chain and specialize in knowledge-intensive, high-value-added goods and services. Although Canada has some leading companies that compete globally, its economy is not as innovative as it could be.
How can Canada become a leader in innovation?
Countries that regularly outperform others on innovation all have coherent strategies. These strategies differ from one country to the next but they all stimulate their country’s capacity to innovate—from the creation of ideas to the transformation of those ideas into new products and services for the domestic and world markets. Canada invests in university research and development but fails to support highly innovative companies to become successful on a global scale.
Innovation policies promote “creative destruction” of the old and hasten the transition to the new. Many of Canada’s industry sector policies are designed to preserve existing industrial production (such as forestry’s pulp and paper sector and auto assembly manufacturing) rather than to generate new, highly innovative ones. In effect, these policies are short-term job protection policies that consume important resources that could be used to support long-term innovation. As a result, they work at cross-purposes to innovation.
Canada has some strong innovation initiatives. But, in the main, these programs create a supply of scientific discovery rather than go the extra step of fostering demand for innovative products. The result is good science faculties and lots of relatively small companies without much prospect of success on a globally efficient scale. The upshot is that Canada moves ahead far more slowly than other countries that enjoy greater innovation policy coherence.
1 This definition has been adapted from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, “
A Guide to Trade-marks: The Basics” [online, cited November 2, 2009].