Quick Hits - Missions, moonshots, industrial strategy, and state capacity
A quick summary of some interesting reads
Happy Monday! Welcome to another Quick Hits summary of pieces that have caught my attention over the last few days. As I get this newsletter started, I’m very much figuring out the right cadence of posts. For now, I’m aiming for Monday and Wednesday Quick Hits, and then a longer deep dive on Fridays. As ever, feedback is very welcome. You can reach me at tom@orbitpolicy.com.
Breaking down silos to enable mission-oriented innovation
Some self-promotion here as last week Policy Options published an article by myself and Professor Sandra Lapointe: Government-led innovation strategy requires a more mission-driven approach.
Our main argument is that if missions are going to be successful, then they cannot be siloed as just matters of science policy. Missions must go beyond research investment and be connected to other policy levers - especially on the demand side. Crucially, the nature of government in Canada means they cannot just sit federally but also must connect to provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, as well as be inclusive of Indigenous communities. Too many essential policy tools sit outside at different levels of government for any mission to succeed federally alone.
As it stands, the proposed capstone research funding organization looks set to be the home of the government's mission agenda. Sandra and I argue that only focusing on more mission-oriented research around societal challenges will only repeat past mistakes. We have already seen how pumping resources in the supply side has only served to produce strong research outputs that then fail to generate wealth or positive societal outcomes for Canadians.
Instead, we highlight some international and Canadian examples that can provide a pathway for us to apply a mission-oriented approach that can truly generate effective solutions to the pressing challenges that we desperately need to solve.
The UK’s Moonshot Agency
This article looks at the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA): Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again. Set up to “put Britain back on the scientific map”, its goal is to catalyze transformational science. Designed along the lines of DARPA, it is a unique organization in the UK, with substantial autonomy in pay and hiring, an exemption from freedom of information requests, and a ten-year window shielding it from government review. Together, these intend to give it the space to enable high-risk high-reward investments.
There have been arguments for a Canadian version of DARPA and I’ve previously written a report on Canada’s Moonshot: Solving grand challenges through transformational innovation. As that report gets into, while I think there is a lot we can learn from agencies like that, just duplicating ARIA for Canada wouldn’t yield the kind of benefits we might hope for. I think this comes down to two main issues - a lack of absorptive capacity in the Canadian economy and industry to commercialize transformational innovations, and a lack of coordination between and within governments that erects barriers to that commercialization. This gets to mine and Sandra’s op-ed on the need to break down silos in government, and my arguments in favour of an industrial strategy that forces us to make decisions about what we want the economy to look like - and where transformational innovation will fit in.
Industrial strategy and productivity
On that note, also from the UK is this piece by Giles Wilkes and Andy Westwood from the Productivity Institute on: Can an industrial strategy help drive productivity growth?
Much like Canada, the UK is struggling with lagging productivity. For this piece, Wilkes and Westwood get into the recent history of industrial strategies in the UK and how Labour’s forthcoming one could be applied to the productivity challenge.
I particularly like how they frame industrial strategy around the need for a tight focus that is explicit about the choices made and the trade-offs required:
A strategy cannot and should not seek to do “everything”, but must mean choices, focus, a decision to place your bets. The decision to have one must be founded on a strong sense of where investment might yield disproportionate results. In these times of rapid technological change and new evolving global pressures there will be a constant flow of firms and sectors desiring more subsidy. A good strategy and a strong government will need to remain firm about what is not included.
They argue that an industrial strategy for the UK should focus on three starting points: 1. net zero as “an agenda that so obviously requires strategic government involvement as decarbonisation of our energy system, transport, agriculture, housing and industry”, 2. sectors where “the UK has some deep-set strengths, and the potential to do better in the global marketplace”; and 3. supporting regional laggards as “Britain will not recover its overall productivity if it leaves swathes of the country far behind their potential”.
For me, these are starting points that could equally apply to Canada.
On Building State Capacity
Picking up on a theme from one of last week’s Quick Hits, here are two pieces from the US on building out state capacity.
The first, How to Build State Capacity from the Statecraft newsletter, interviews two thinkers in this space, Sam Hammond and Jen Pahlka. It covers a lot of ground, and is very focused on the US, but includes some really interesting discussion. One particular highlight for me was this from Pahlka on the need for a vision:
We really have to give the thing that we want to move toward a name and let people target it, because I feel like the whole government reform space is just like, “That's bad,” instead of, “That's what good looks like, let's go over there.”
The second piece is from Johns Hopkins professor Henry Farrell on The building blocks of state capacity liberalism. Hat tip to Laurent Carbonneau, for sharing it with me, this piece gets deep into the weeds on current debates raging in the US on issues of state capacity and post-neoliberalism. This I think is pertinent to some of the policy discussion here:
Discussion should start with a straightforward acknowledgment that strong-form neoliberalism - the default assumption that Markets Know Best and that the function of the state is to support market activity and minimally correct for its failures - is basically defunct. We live in a world of enormous, complex and mutually entangled problems, which markets are visibly incapable of handling on their own.
Dan Breznitz’s current series in the Globe and Mail, which I wrote about last week, also comes from a similar starting point. It is great to see some real Canadian commentary on this, but we need a much more fulsome debate about how to build the capacity, federally and provincially, to equip us to deal with those challenges.