A recipe for a strong knowledge-based economy

Q: Let me start off with a hardball question. There are those who argue that Canada is nuts to see innovation as its future because it has so many natural resources that it should just extract and mine and farm and lumber those as long as it can. Your thoughts?

I would say they are nuts or, maybe it's better said as the English put it, they are cracked.

Because?

Because the riches of the modern world come from the things we make of our resources. It's not what you have, it's what you make of what you have that in the long run matters. To ignore that truth is almost to say you don't want to be modern. But we in this province and this country tend to do that, and that is why I have come up with my 10-Step Program to Establish a Knowledge Economy. It's sort of my version of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, but my program aims at weaning the province and the country off a dependence on resource sectors.

Run through the steps.

Step 1: You have to decide that this is our future and then embrace a science culture. Step 2 : You've got to teach science appreciation to our kids. They have to say to themselves: In Canada, science 'r' us. Step 3 : You've got to not just support universities but make them say to themselves, "We are the economic engines of the future."
Step 4 : And this means they can't give away their intellectual property.

We haven't done that too well in the past.

No, we haven't. And maybe we should think about putting in place in this country our equivalent to the Americans' Bayh-Dole Act. It requires universities to do what I suggested in Step 4 in order to receive federal research funding. And that leads me to Step 5 : We have to professionalize the knowledge transfer from universities. Part of the reason transfer didn't happen regularly in the past was that the process was too often just happenstance. And part of the way to make this transition more efficient is Step 6 : Develop a new generation of university and industry-based entrepreneurs who see that tapping academic research is a way they can get - the next is not a dirty word - rich.

Where's the money to do this coming from?

I'm coming to that. Step 7 : We need to develop a series of small business development grants whose purpose it is to incubate the process by which research turns into product. Think of the government tending to a field full of just sprouting innovations. Step 8 : Then we need to stimulate a venture capital community to salivate over the potential of research coming out of universities, and one of the ways of doing this is by making our present tax systems friendlier to that process. Give these people inducements to help the research seedlings grow.

This sounds like the movie Jerry Maguire's second most famous line: "Help me, help you."

Precisely. That's whyStep 9 is putting more incentives in place that encourage investments from all the communities with money - the angels, the venture capitalists, the financial institutions. They have to think that a knowledge economy, not an extractive economy, is their future too.

And number 10.

Step 10 is that government as a whole, not just some ministry associated with economic development, must say: Our future is a knowledge-based economy. All their efforts, their procurement policies, their intellectual property policies but most of all their collective thinking must revolve around the notion that knowledge is not just power. Knowledge is wealth, and knowledge is our future.

You aren't saying don't extract anything.

Absolutely not. I'm saying do everything, including mining, including farming, including forestry, smart and then smarter. A knowledge-based economy will make all fields better and more profitable.