Innovation: counting what counts

The Trudeau government just unveiled its innovation agenda, which identifies several core priorities.  They include promoting better discovery, fostering business clusters, enabling commercialization and upgrading workforce talent.  Innovation seeks to create smarter, faster and greener ways of doing things. It nurtures new ideas and methods, which subsequently are converted into marketable products and processes.  This commentary argues that we need to move beyond understanding innovation solely as a set of technical processes – toward a broader conceptualization of innovation as a problem-solving methodology.  New technology is necessary but not sufficient.  One complex problem, for example, is the stubbornly high unemployment rate of persons with disabilities.  The success of our innovation efforts should be assessed not only by how much we count – but also by how well we tackle the issues that count.

ISBN – 1-55382-671-X