Quick Hits - Science Advice, Innovation Policy, and Innovation Districts
A quick summary of some interesting reads
Happy Wednesday! Today I want to highlight a few pieces from Canada and internationally. The first is on the recent publication of the Walport Review on the COVID-19 response and the need for Canada to up its science advice game. The second looks at some of the contrasting approaches to science and innovation policy in the US election, before the last turns towards industry-academic collaboration and place-based innovation.
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The Walport Review on Pandemic Science Advice and Research Coordination
Last week, the Federal government released the long-awaited review of the federal response to the pandemic led by UK scientist and health official Sir Mark Walport. There are two main stories out of this. One is Canada’s deep weaknesses in the response to COVID-19 and the urgent need to take steps to fix glaring deficiencies. The other is the fact that the federal government did everything it could to hide this report for as long as possible and looks set to ignore its advice.
Journalist Paul Wells has been a lone figure pushing for transparency and accountability in both of these stories. His write-up of the report is a must-read.
The Walport review is damning in many ways. It found that the pandemic “exposed and exacerbated the weaker elements of Canada's health research and science advisory systems” and that there were “severe shortcomings of health data systems and an inability to conduct timely and adequate observational studies”. Collaboration between different levels of government was inadequate, with “a lack of sufficiently robust systems for specifically coordinating research and science advice across the country in response to a nationwide emergency of such scale”. Furthermore, “the absence of pre-existing emergency protocols for science advice in Canada caused significant delays, with time being of the essence in an emergency, as well as coordination issues within and across all levels of government”
There is lot more there, including recommendations to fix issues. However, there are reasons to doubt that any of these recommendations will be followed. As Paul Wells’ reporting shows, the signals aren’t positive that the federal government is committed to improvement in such a critical area. Yet, this is another area where we must increase Canada’s state capacity. With climate change heightening the risks of new pandemics - we need our federal and provincial governments to be able to work effectively to address the challenges we face.
The US Election: Science Advice and Technology Policy
With the US election getting close, there are two very different visions towards science and science advice on display, yet two very aligned ideas about technology policy. That is the view of Kenneth Evans in this piece for the Conversation. The Biden-Harris administration has taken a very pro-science approach, consistently getting significant increases in R&D approved by Congress. The appointment of Arati Prabhakar, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as a member of the cabinet, also displays an emphasis on the importance of science advice. All of this is markedly different from from Trump’s approaches during his first term and there is little reason to suspect anything different should he win, with Evan's noting his “dismissal of and at times outright contempt for scientific consensus”.
Where both Trump and Harris are aligned is with “the emerging Washington bipartisan consensus on China: innovation policy at home, strategic decoupling abroad”. The reason Biden and Harris were able to secure increases in R&D funding is very much because it was tied towards maintaining the USA’s technological supremacy against China, and rebuilding high-tech manufacturing capacity. This is likely to continue - adding to the continuing global advanced technology subsidy race and rising technological protectionism. As I’ve written about before, Canada is getting drawn into this vision of American economic security, and it is far from clear that this is in Canada’s best interests.
Evolving Innovation Districts
From the big picture of innovation policy to a local lens on how university-industry collaboration is evolving. This write-up of a panel from the Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit has some interesting takeaways on place-based innovation. Faye Bowser, VP for Higher Education at Siemens, emphasized their shift from singular relationships with universities towards more “purpose-driven” ecosystem approaches that bring in more partners.
Bowser and Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, both emphasized too how the geography of innovation in the US is changing, with an “exodus from the coastal areas - California, New York - and the Midwest” to the Sun Belt. This is in part driven by affordability and tax policy, as the panellists point out, but shifting innovation activity to a broader geographic base is a major aspect of recent US policies. As Brookings Institution expert Mark Muro has highlighted before:
nearly half of all federal R&D spending flowing to just six states, and often concentrating in a small number of metropolitan areas. As a result, the nation’s high-productivity, high-pay innovation economy has become hyper-concentrated in just a handful of “superstar” cities, with most other places falling far behind.
While in Canada we often bemoan the “peanut butter” getting spread too thin - it is interesting to note the shift in both activity and policy in the US towards a more Canadian model of spreading broad-based geographical innovation.