Abstract:
As Canada navigates an increasingly complex and unpredictable global security environment, the imperative to strengthen national security and resilience has never been greater. In this context, science, innovation, and coordinated action across industry, academia, and government are not just enablers—they are essential. Canada’s five Global Innovation Clusters—DIGITAL, Protein Industries Canada, NGEN, Scale AI, and Oceans Supercluster—stand united in recognizing the critical role that collaborative innovation ecosystems can play in advancing Canada’s defence and security priorities. Together, we represent a powerful national platform for accelerating research, commercialization, and cross-sector partnerships that deliver both economic and strategic value. Our clusters are already driving transformative change in areas with direct relevance to security: artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, secure digital infrastructure, sustainable food systems, and maritime technologies. These innovations are not only shaping the future of our industries, they are also enabling dual-use applications that can enhance Canada’s operational readiness, supply chain resilience, and technological sovereignty. We believe that the speed, agility, and relevance of cluster-led initiatives offer a unique advantage in addressing emerging defence challenges. By fostering deeper engagement between our innovation ecosystems and defence stakeholders, we can unlock new pathways for collaboration by bridging the gap between cutting-edge science and real-world capability. This is a call to action. We invite Canada’s defence community, policymakers, and the broader science and innovation ecosystem to work with us in shaping a more secure, resilient, and prosperous future. Together, we can ensure that Canadian innovation is not only a driver of economic growth—but also a cornerstone of national security.

Summary of Conversations 

The conversation focused on the national shift in innovation funding from singular, uncoordinated investments to a concerted, collaborative approach across large corporations, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), universities, and public institutions. Participants noted the initial difficulty of fostering collaboration across geographic and organizational boundaries, but affirmed the program’s success in commercializing research. Key examples included a technology cluster generating a reported 12x return on investment, $4 billion in GDP, and creating 190 commercial products. The ocean sector was highlighted as an area with massive growth potential, significantly under-contributing to the country’s GDP compared to the global average. A central theme was the “dual use” potential of existing commercial technologies—such as drones, AI logistics systems, and advanced sensing—to address national defense and security needs. The consensus emphasized scaling up technology, retaining intellectual property (IP) domestically, and accelerating the adoption of homegrown innovation.

Take Away Messages/Current Status of Challenges

• Fostering genuine collaboration across disparate geographic regions and between small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and large multinational corporations remains a considerable practical challenge.
• The national system excels at research but has a persistent, significant gap in translating those capabilities into domestically adopted, scaled, and commercially viable end-user products.
• Fragmented government and procurement systems, such as the numerous provincial submissions required for healthcare technology adoption, slow down domestic scaling compared to unified international markets.
• Access to domestic capital for scaling remains a major barrier, often requiring successful Canadian companies to secure investment from international sources to achieve growth.
• Integrating commercially-developed SME technology into the defense ecosystem is complicated by the additional rigor and due diligence required for national security applications.
• Sectors like the ocean economy are vastly undersized relative to the country’s geographic assets, currently contributing only 1.8% to GDP compared to a 3.2% global average.
• The rapid and volatile “hype-death-growth” cycles of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence require innovation programs to maintain continuous, flexible adaptation to market maturity.
• There is a lack of comprehensive national understanding regarding where specific advanced manufacturing and technology capabilities already exist for potential dual-use applications in defense.

Recommendations/Next Steps

• The greatest opportunity lies in prioritizing and aggressively driving the domestic adoption of Canadian-made technology to enhance national security, grow the GDP, and ensure companies scale at home.
• Innovation strategy should focus on a “demand-pull” approach, ensuring that technology providers build solutions tailored to the end-user needs of industry, rather than pushing generic, pre-baked R&D outputs.
• Government support for innovation should emphasize continuity, patience, and clear visibility, as the coordinated cluster approach is recognized internationally as a successful model for collaboration.
• Actively leverage the “dual use” concept by examining current commercial technology portfolios (e.g., in digital, advanced manufacturing, and ocean sectors) and redeploying them to directly address defense and security requirements.
• Encourage companies to adopt a global mindset from the outset, connecting with international markets and capital to support the scaling necessary for world leadership.
• Focus investment not just on basic research, but on the full continuum to commercialization, including funding for non-research roles such as data scientists, data engineers, and system integrators to translate lab work into real products.
• Advance the national innovation agenda by acting as a single, unified country to overcome fragmentation, leveraging the clusters as key vehicles for pan-Canadian cooperation.
• Shift the focus in natural resource industries like agriculture from simply growing commodities to creating value-added, high-quality intermediate and final products to ensure national sovereignty and attract stable investment.