Intentional Innovation: Solving Canada’s productivity paradox through private + public partnerships

It’s well-understood that industrial research done in collaboration with post-secondary expertise can help to move new products to market. This understanding has been the basis for programs like the NSERC Alliance, funding agencies such as OCI and mitacs, and collaboration facilitators like Tamarak Institute and City Studio over the past several decades. Yet despite these investments, Canada’s labour productivity growth rate is half that of the US and productivity continues to lag behind that of our OECD peers.In 2024 the Bank of Canada called Canada’s lagging productivity an emergency which continues to today. 

An important part of the solution to our prolonged poor productivity is private+public collaborative innovation projects. Adopting an intentional approach to supporting innovation in firms entails providing a proactive and responsive postsecondary education sector to meet the needs of companies seeking to innovate. Intentional innovation means providing support for the three legs of the productivity stool – business investment in

1. Research and development
2. New technology Adoption, and
3. Training and upskilling.

Canadian firms underinvest in all three of these as compared to our international counterparts. The postsecondary education system is ideally placed to support and derisk investment in all three legs by taking a proactive approach to sponsoring industry+academic partnerships with a focus on facilitating easy, positive, and consistent experiences. 

Canada is one of the most educated countries in the world, scoring in the top 5 globally across several measures. Our post-secondary education sector punches well above our weight class, and we invest strongly in academic research to support it. Yet we struggle to translate that investment in higher education research into business investment in R&D and tangible economic results. Experts have speculated as to the reasons why and how they contribute to a lack of productivity, citing ideas such as a culture that doesn’t support innovators; difficult to navigate interprovincial regulations; and a risk adverse industry sector. While these may be a part of the puzzle, we would like to posit that an under discussed aspect is the idea within academia that exploratory research is only the purview of higher education research and that applied research isn’t something that they do.

While some researchers have strong relationships with community organizations, local government, and business, many researchers can be hesitant to collaborate with industry. This presents a problem when fostering entrepreneurship. How can we, as a society, expect young researchers to have an entrepreneurial spirit or see the value of their expertise to industry when they are not given the opportunity to develop the tools to apply their skills to real world problems as part of their education? Perhaps then the solution needs to not just be one of policies that support entrepreneurs but policies to help change culture by building bridges between academia and businesses. 

There are many good examples of an effective demand-driven approach that supports industry+academic partnerships. Notable exemplars include the Synchronex CCTT Network in Quebec, the Tech-Access Canada network that spans the country, and the Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation and the Earth District that each bring together the capacity of colleges and universities to support industry innovation. These (and others like them) have in common the explicit focus of leveraging academic expertise to address industry innovation needs. This means less focus on basic research (TRLs 1-2), and more focus on applied research (TRLs 3-4) and experimental development (TRLs 5-9). 

With the changing global political landscape and relationship with the US, Canada has an opportunity to rewrite our innovation landscape. Small and Medium Enterprise (SMEs) make up 97.9% of businesses in Canada and they are facing an unpredictable and shifting market forcing them to innovate; academic expertise can help derisk that R&D and overcome challenges bringing new products to market. It’s time we create a culture that recognizes the societal value of applied research, particularly for our SMEs who traditionally struggle to connect with academia and are often unaware that it’s even an option. We are not the only organization calling for this culture change. 

In the February 2025 report, Canada’s productivity paradox, BDO highlights fostering a culture of innovation, increasing stakeholder collaboration, and increasing technology adoption through addressing of skills gaps as key strategies to addressing Canada’s productivity challenges. Ontario has been leading in several of these strategies such as through the Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence, and Security’s investment in Micro-credential Portal (MC Portal) and Ontario Collaborative Innovation Platform (OCIP), both operated by eCampusOntario.

Developed under Ontario’s Micro-credentials Strategy investment, the MC Portal, which launched in 2021, leverages labour market information (LMI) to help learners and employers bridge skills gaps while supporting people’s career goals to bolster the national workforce and address economic resilience. As a part of this investment, a micro-credential challenge fund was created to fast-track development of micro-credentials and expand the program offerings of member institutions. This resulted in over 300 new micro-credentials being launched, with member institutions continuing to develop new market-focused offerings. Currently there are over 2600 short-form learning opportunities on the MC Portal. Since its inception, the MC Portal has seen over 48,000 click throughs to institution registration pages with a potential of up to $40 million in revenue being directed to member institutions. 

Launched in fall of 2023, OCIP aims to foster increased stakeholder collaborations through a matchmaking platform that makes it easier for SMEs to connect to subject matter experts within Ontario’s higher education sector for the purpose of working through a scoping exercise. These help businesses better understand their innovation challenges and make informed decisions regarding R&D. This process is designed to help move innovations closer to commercialization, create connections, and ensure projects have been well thought out prior to application for funding. This approach has seen early successes with ~55% of scoping collaborations moving to full scale projects and innovation ecosystem partners, such as regional innovation centres and economic development agencies, seeing OCIP as a valuable tool in their toolbelt when serving clients. 

Taken together, OCIP and the MC Portal are addressing the three legs of the productivity stool: OCIP supports industry-focused R&D and new technology adoption with the guidance of academic experts; the MC Portal provide businesses and individual with fast access to industry-relevant upskilling. As a part of creating a no wrong door approach to the innovation ecosystem, Campus Exchange was launched in early 2025 to create an easy to navigate, single point of entry into the suite of industry focused eCampusOntario programs. This enables businesses to find a willing academic partner in the 54 member institutions of eCampusOntario to help them address any one of the three legs of the productivity stool. 

These platforms have seen early success and can provide a potential model for building a more integrated innovation and skills development strategy. Such a strategy brings together businesses, government, and higher education to begin solving the puzzle of Canada’s productivity paradox. Through investment in technologies built around key strategies to increase collaboration, support adoption of technology, and address workforce skills gaps we can design policy to begin changing culture and truly foster innovation. The world is changing and so must Canada.