Community-Driven Innovation & Provincial Innovation
Some quick hit reading recommendations
Happy Friday! I’m in the thick of finalizing a draft report for a client, so today’s post is a shorter one. First I highlight some writing from the UK on community-driven innovation before turning to Manitoba where the government has created a Department of Innovation and New Technology. I hope you enjoy it!
Innovation for people and place
This essay, written by UK-based Rachel Coldicutt and Matt Dowse, gets at an incredibly important topic - what good is innovation if it doesn’t work for everyone? I have written on here a few times along this theme - that we need to ensure not only that everyone can participate as innovators, but that everyone also needs to benefit from the innovations themselves, and on that, we are failing.
In this piece the authors argue that the UK’s focus on corporate growth and research excellence “overlooks the real world of innovation that unfolds day-to-day in neighbourhoods, on high streets and in local communities, powered by ingenuity, experimentation, and the adaption and reuse of existing technologies”.
In their view, rather than a hyper focus on scaling technologies where the gains benefit only a “small, socially elite group of innovators”, policy should instead prioritizing creating “more plural, more equitable opportunities that are accessible beyond major research institutions and massive tech corporations, that prioritise regeneration over extraction, and that uplift and empower people and communities in their diversity”.
There is lots more in their thoughtful and provocative essay and I do recommend reading it. As I wrote last week on my takeaways from CSA’s healthcare policy conference, too many amazing innovations remain out of reach for vast portions of the population. At a time of immense wealth and technological progress, is it a surprise that we are also seeing polarization and authortarian backlash? While by no means the whole picture, these trends aren’t unconnected. People in the innovation policy space should be thinking about how the types and models of innovation we encourage and fund fit into a broader picture of the society and economy that we want to see.
Provincial Innovation
Another, connected, theme that I have spent a lot of time thinking about is the role of provincial policy making in Canada’s innovation economy. As I also wrote about last week, we too often default to the need for a national strategies without real consideration of where provinces need to fit in given Canada’s highly decentralized system. I believe that provinces should have a greater role in setting out their own industrial and innovation strategies, and these should go beyond the more narrow sectoral approaches that we typically see.
In light of this it is interesting to see that Manitoba just created a new Department of Innovation and New Technology to be led by Mike Moroz. It looks set to have a broad mandate covering both digital government as well as helping “grow Manitoba’s tech industry, support businesses and foster innovation”. Minister Moroz’s mandate letter gets into more detail, including tasking him with helping businesses use tech to boost competitiveness, supporting the development of AI while protecting jobs and privacy, working on how to gain a competitive advantage through the development and ownership of AI, and modernizing medical data sharing.
Hopefully Minister Moroz will take that mandate forward in a way that embodies what Coldicutt and Dowse argue above. This is an opportunity to take a broad view of the role of innovation in Manitoba’s society and economy. While it could be easy to take a narrow sectoral approach, there is a chance to use this platform to ensure that innovation really is something that creates widely felt benefits for Manitobans. Provinces have more levers to shape this kind of approach than the federal government, so it is important that they have the ambition to take that forward.