About This Report
Innovation is a core ingredient in the prosperity and well-being of a community. New or improved services, products, and processes—and the business and social benefits they generate––shape economic performance, as well as individual and community well-being. However, as many reports and scorecards have revealed, Canada’s innovation performance is lacklustre when compared to our OECD and G7 peers. At the same time, economists and policymakers are realizing that a focus on innovation and economic growth alone can create large disparities between various demographics and income levels. Innovation can generate substantial economic and social benefits—but often those benefits are captured by a select few rather than more equitably distributed among groups and regions. Due to data collection and reporting lags among key organizations, our data and analysis was developed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis. However, the current situation and the ensuing economic crisis have revealed the need to boost participation in the innovation economy and broaden the distribution of its benefits among groups and regions. This is needed to simultaneously foster a more inclusive and equitable economy and to improve innovation performance itself.
In order to address these disparities and improve Canada’s inclusive innovation performance, we need to understand our strengths and weaknesses. To that end, this report gathers a wide array of metrics and data that speak to our innovation performance, how opportunities to participate are distributed, and who reaps the benefits. Metrics include categories like education, financing, entrepreneurship, technology adoption, wages, wealth distribution, and dimensions like sex, race, Indigenous identity, and disability. These broad categories are then broken down further into more granular details, such as the number of researchers in a country, the amount spent on research and development, indicators of women entrepreneurship, and intergenerational income mobility rates.
Read this report to help you:
- Understand what inclusive innovation means.
- Explore a wide range of innovation and inclusion data—from R&D spending, technology adoption and patenting to the distribution of educational attainment, labour force participation, income, wealth and poverty by gender, racial identity, disability, and region.
- Learn about Canada’s strengths in inclusive innovation, and where we fall short.
- Identify where we need more and better data to fully understand Canada’s inclusive innovation performance.
