Science + Policy
COVID, Confederation, and Innovation
David Castle
Professor, School of Public Administration and Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria
D
Peter Phillips
Distinguished Professor and Founding Director, Centre for the Study of Science and Innovation Policy (CSIP), Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan
escribing and evaluating a country’s innovation system is conceptually and empirically challenging work. The two of us have for years been exploring the system, both at the national level and in the context of industrial and technological innovations at the local and regional level. Now we have led a team to explore the middle space – provinces and territories.
Together with our colleague Bruce Doern, we undertook a study of the Canadian innovation system, published in 2016 as Canadian Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy: The Innovation Economy and Society Nexus. Like any study of national innovation systems, we held some institutional and organizational dimensions as constants to allow sharper focus on policy processes and implementation dynamics that were of interest to us. We could see, for example how science for policy was distributed across departments and agencies, growing steadily since the 1970s in terms of impact, but yet rarely a point of discussion in the House of Commons. Regarding policies for science and innovation, we could see the effects of supply-side economics, recapitalization of infrastructure, and experiments in the geography and scale of innovation. Our approach in our work with Doern was consistent with most of the scholarship about national systems of innovation that creates a portrait of innovation on the canvas of a nation state. To the extent that researching
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