David Watters is a former assistant deputy minister for Economic Development and Corporate Finance in the Department of Finance, the founder and former CEO of the Global Advantage Consulting Group, and the founder and current president of the not-for-profit Institute for Collaborative Innovation. This op-ed first appeared here.

Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Ecosystem is a derelict 60-year-old rusting “Knowledge Factory,” whose customers find its knowledge products to be frequently irrelevant to their needs, costly, difficult to access and often vague about claimed benefits.

New factory management is needed to improve its weak and declining performance. This commentary is intended to provide advice to the new management team, who may appear at the factory door within several weeks.

What is Canada’s Knowledge Factory?

Canada’s Knowledge Factory has four key stakeholder groups – Governments, universities and colleges, businesses, and domestic and foreign markets – who fund, regulate, produce, access and use new knowledge embodied in talent, text (publications) and technology. We commonly refer to this factory as Canada’s STI Ecosystem.

Collectively these stakeholders spend $53 billion annually operating this factory.

However, the performance of this Knowledge Factory has been declining over the past two decades, and currently ranks 17^th among OECD nations in terms of gross domestic spending on research and development, and second-last among the G7 economies. How could its performance be improved?

What does the Knowledge Factory Do?

Canada’s Knowledge Factory provides three essential services to customers:

• It produces and accumulates relevant new knowledge.
• It mobilizes and distributes this knowledge.
• It helps customers use the knowledge to achieve results.

Let’s examine each of these three services in turn:

Accumulating Relevant New Knowledge

What new knowledge do Canadians really need? That depends on their assessment of the key economic, social, and environmental risks and challenges they will likely encounter over the next 10 years.

For example, how could we better anticipate and manage wildfires or housing affordability? More generally, how could we either produce relevant new knowledge domestically from public and private sector R&D activity or, access it globally, in order to help us make better decisions in managing the impacts of key risks and challenges?

Such challenges will include citizens’ needs for: affordable housing and food; cleaner environment and energy; better health and social services; educational opportunities and sustainable employment; safe communities and national security; and economic growth.

Note that many of these challenges appear to be increasing in severity.

Knowledge Mobilization and Distribution

Once Canada is able to either produce the relevant knowledge we need to manage these risks, or access it from global sources (note that Canada produces only about one percent of the world’s structured knowledge). How  do we then integrate it with existing pools of knowledge and organize it to be useful to four distinct categories of knowledge users?

• Governments: How could the three levels of government get better access to knowledge from academic institutions and the business sector about global trends in research, and technology development – and the likely impacts on the needs of citizens?
• Businesses: How could the business sector get better access to knowledge from governments about emerging global competitors or new market opportunities (for example by the trade commissioner service), or about new government research, regulatory regimes, or changing economic conditions, and from academic institutions about emerging research, or sources of skilled talent?
• Academic Institutions: How could academic institutions get better access to knowledge from governments and the business sector about changes to their talent requirements, or research needs for regulatory, policy or commercial purposes?
• Society at large: How could the public receive better communication from governments, businesses and universities and colleges about new services being offered to respond to their everyday needs (for example, explaining the costs and benefits of a new COVID-19 vaccine, or the safety of a new AI platform, or of new skills training in emerging technologies, etc.)?

Knowledge Use and Impact

After knowledge from the Knowledge Factory is accumulated, organized, mobilized and distributed to retail outlets for use, how should consumers employ it?

In all cases, the new knowledge is used for a single purpose – to contribute to making and implementing better decisions. For example:

• Governments would use that knowledge to produce better laws, policies and programs for their citizens.
• Businesses would use that knowledge to produce new technologies and services to meet the needs of customers.
• Universities and colleges would use that knowledge to produce better talent and ideas for their communities.
• The public would use that knowledge to make better decisions to improve their personal, family and community lives.

Conclusion

The entire $53-billion Knowledge Factory is designed to produce a single outcome – new knowledge that improves the lives of citizens.

If the new management team keeps this sole purpose in mind as they assume responsibility for the operations of the Knowledge Factory, I am sure they will find ways to reduce costs and waste, enhance relevance and performance, improve efficiency and service delivery, communicate better with suppliers and customers, and clarify to the public the value proposition of an important national asset in need of repair.

Good luck, team!

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