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Perpetual Motion Policy

By crooky | March 17, 2007

(Originally posted on policy.ca on October 23, 2006)

Policy.ca tried to get blogging going on their website last year and I was one of the few bloggers that posted there. This article was the first policy blog article to feature on the site but unfortunately the policy.ca blog was shortlived. I wanted to re-post this article because I think it accurately describes my feelings about science and technology policy - a thread that runs through all of my professional activities.

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As a young analyst with the Science Council of BC, my boss gave me the pleasure of reviewing and then disposing of the dozens of perpetual motion machine-type research funding requests we received every year. Even though conventional science tells us that perpetual motion machines are the Flying Spaghetti Monsters of intellectual property, it didn’t stop the applications from rolling in. I feel that Canada (and the Provinces) are pursuing science and technology as an economic driver in much the same manner.

Ever since I started in S&T Policy in the late 1990s, I saw public servants toiling away in Ottawa and in the Provincial capitals trying to find ways to lever the high-tech fever that was gripping Canada during the heydays of Nortel and thousands of dot-coms. They were trying to turn publicly-funded research into economic development for the whole country. The phrase “float all boats” was thrown around like the Poseidon. I thought I had discovered something new. I felt like I was at the tip of the spear. Then, in 2001, I discovered the awful truth. I hadn’t discovered some kind of secret – the Government of Canada had been (some might argue unsuccessfully) trying to turn innovation into an economic driver for Canada since the mid 1960s.

Aside from economic development, Government-funded labs have put Canada on the scientific map in a number of areas – aerospace, nuclear energy and telecommunications, to name but a few. Canadians are, in my completely unbiased opinion, clever little beavers and our public labs attract some really amazing researchers from all over the world – particularly South Asia. Yet, we’re still playing catch-up with OECD economic leaders to (such as Japan, the US and Finland) in terms of Gross Expenditures on Research and Development as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GERD/GDP). GERD/GDP has been lauded (not without controversy) for years as a magic bullet that can somehow push an entire economy into a knowledge-based economic mode, if only you can get your economy to the 2%+ range.

This has been a source of much frustration for my colleagues here in BC. One of them, following a National Research Council presentation in Vancouver sighed “Two tenths of a percent increase in GERD/GDP – that’s my entire career in technology commercialization.” Canada, in nearly forty years of trying to drag that ratio up, has yet to crack two percent.

Much as I despise navel-gazing, Canada’s pursuit of GERD/GDP warrants some retrospective hand-wringing. Where did we go wrong? Did we not dump billions, if not trillions of public dollars into R&D? Did we not do our best to attract world-class researchers to our universities and public laboratories? My good friend Alan Cornford would tell Canada’s policy-makers that we haven’t gotten the balance between new ideas, high quality people and financial capital right. Like a cake with too little baking powder, Canada’s knowledge economy has come out flat (I was going to make an analogy about homemade explosives but didn’t feel like a visit from the RCMP).

While I think that Alan is onto something and his ideas should be explored by Canada’s S&T policy-makers, it begs another question – should we put all of our eggs in the knowledge economy basket? Common sense tells me that there needs to be a balance between the GDP-generating sectors. While I firmly believe that Canada should and could be more innovative, I don’t think that the knowledge economy should represent 100% of GDP in this country. We have some natural advantages in Canada that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

Our abundant renewable natural resources spring to mind. Forestry, hydroelectricity and bio-fuels like grain-based ethanol can and will continue to be important economic drivers for large portions of Canada. While I have nothing specific against non-renewable resources, I’ve also seen the risk of putting too much stock in something that is, by its nature, not going to last. At some point, the tar sands, the diamond mines and the uranium deposits are going to run out. Trees, water and grain, if properly managed – maybe with the assistance of some shiny, new Canadian technology – can continue to push Canada’s economy along at a modest, Canadian pace for millennia to come.

What’s my point? I almost lost it there as my heart swelled to dangerous dimensions with national pride. My point is that we may never achieve a GERD/GDP ratio comparable to Finland or Japan. Maybe we should stop trying. Canada could enjoy the fruits of innovation on our terms. What would that look like? Imagine a future where innovation flourishes in Canada but its impacts are felt in more subtle ways than stock-index increases. If innovation was leveraged to support Canada’s renewable resource industries and our healthcare system, quality of life for Canadians could go up. Think about it. Why do countries want a high GERD/GDP score? So they can apply the rewards to quality of life What if GDP wasn’t part of the picture and the express goal of technological progress was to improve quality of life? In the end, why do we accumulate wealth? To increase our quality of life, of course.

With the end of this rambling shamble of a blog entry, I pose this challenge to Canada’s S&T policy makers – assume that Canada will never catch up to Japan or Finland in terms of GERD/GDP. How can Canadian science and technology make the lives of Canadians better? If we don’t refocus our efforts as policy makers, we run the risk of looking like those poor souls who throw their lives at perpetual motion machines.

After writing this posting, I had the privilege of seeing Fred Gault from Statistics Canada speak at an SFU CPROST speaker series. StatCan is wrestling with these issues at the moment are keenly aware that GERD/GDP is an imperfect metric for measuring innovation.

Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years. He’s a policy analyst, a communications professional and a competitive intelligence consultant. After work, he fancies himself a comedian of sorts.

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