Does Canada Have an Innovation Problem? — Podcasts (2022)

This episode of Shopify Masters is part of our collaboration series with YouTube channel Learn with Shopify. Over the next few months, we’ll be releasing a bonus Shopify Masters Podcast every week, focusing on tips and trends specific to entrepreneurs.

What is the biggest threat to Canada’s financial future?

If you ask one of Canada’s leading economic thinkers, he’ll tell you it’s a shortage innovation.

“We are very good inside creation,” Dan Breznitz, current Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at the Canadian Department of Finance, said. “We are good at generating great new ideas and new research, but very bad at creating companies, jobs and growth from our own ideas.”

Breznitz argues in his latest book, Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World, that without better innovation policies, successful big companies like Shopify are less likely to be founded in places like Canada. To fix this, he said, everyone from local officials to individual business owners should think about where they fit in the global production process and not try to copy the “Silicon Valley formula”.

“The Silicon Valley model — if you want to be really cynical — wasn’t to create Shopify or Alphabet,” said Breznitz, who is also a professor at the University of Toronto where he serves as the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies. “It’s about creating as many companies as you can sell. This industry is based on creating and selling companies, not on innovation.”

Breznitz says it’s easy to combine two ideas: invention and innovation. But the distinction, he said, is important for both business leaders and elected officials to understand.

“So the invention is, if I take you back to my lab at the University of Toronto, we sit down and come up with new technology. We might do a prototype and get a patent,” said Breznitz. “Innovation happens when we try to … create a product or improve a product or service.

Breznitz gives many examples of this in his book, such as telephones or bicycles.

“Bicycles are two centuries old technology,” Breznitz said. “… yet a Taiwanese company, by figuring out how to use carbon fiber for a frame, can suddenly offer a mountain bike that everyone can use, not just athletes. That is innovation.”

One of the first steps he suggests is “decentralizing innovation.” For entrepreneurs and founders who don’t live in tech hubs or business hubs, it’s important to understand the special niche they might fill in the global market.

“In every industry, you work in stages. There are places that are technology or business hubs but there are places that will see a great idea and really know how to make it a reality or know how to produce it cheaper,” said Breznitz. “You have to understand that we live in a global system.”

To hear more about how entrepreneurs and community leaders in Canada can boost the innovation economy, listen to Breznitz’s full interview as part of our Learn with Shopify series below:

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source: https://www.shopify.co.id/blog/dan-breznitz