Running In Place
How Canada's Innovation Ecosystem is Failing the People it Claims to Serve
An introductory blog for a five-part series
The other day I heard that Toronto has more accelerators than New York City. I was not surprised in the slightest to hear that.
Canada has no shortage of innovation programs. We rank second in the G7 for post-secondary R&D spend¹, offer some of the most generous business R&D tax incentives in the world³, and produce more accelerators per capita than cities twice our size⁵. Yet total R&D as a share of GDP sits below the OECD average, productivity growth lags most peer nations², and advanced industry output has declined relative to the global average for three decades straight⁵. Back in 2024, Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers called it an emergency and told the country it was “time to break the glass.”²
Canada continues to break the mold when it comes to innovation. Unfortunately, the ways in which we break it scream economic instability rather than actual innovation, and with rhetoric running hotter by the day while policy grows only more detached, the whole thing reads like satire.
Is there a country-wide gas leak? Because the uncomfortable truth is that the majority of the programming designed to move our innovation ecosystems in the right direction is awful — and nearly everyone, from institutional leadership across sectors to innovators I have spoken with, knows it — but the system is structured in a way where no one feels obligated to voice these failings publicly, in the realm of common knowledge.
In a roundabout fashion, the Canadian economy appears to be running exactly as planned — it is just that unfortunately the plan appears to be nearly completely bat-shit crazy — and we appear to be doubling down on it³, ⁴, ⁵
This series argues that Canada’s innovation ecosystem is failing, and will continue to fail unless a reckoning is faced, for two primary reasons:
1) It is executing poorly.
The programming is poor, in particular early-stage innovation programs that get innovators from idea to prototype. They are top-heavy, low volume, the incentives are misaligned, and the reporting⁵ that is supposed to tell us how we are doing is riddled with gaps, self-serving metrics, and declared successes that dissolve on contact with the underlying data.
2) It is targeted at the wrong problems.
The activity is not aimed at the actual problem. Even if every program ran flawlessly, hit every metric, and spent every dollar as intended, we would still be losing ground.
This series is not a critique focused on later-stage innovation programming, but rather the dysfunction of the front half of the innovation pipeline. The early- and mid-stage programming that is supposed to take a person with an idea and turn them into a builder with traction is on fire, and has been for a very long time. But the billions being thrown at downstream programming and infrastructure will continue to under-perform when very little is making it through the other end of the pipe³, ⁴, ⁶.
This series is written from inside the problem. I have spent the better part of a decade building at the intersection of emerging technology, community, and the institutions designed to support both. I have watched entire disciplines I care about deeply become evermore contorted by perverse incentives and further descend into deadlock. I have navigated funding applications, ecosystem programs, municipal offices, provincial agencies, post-secondary partnerships, and federal initiatives. I have sat across tables from people with genuine intentions and structural constraints that made honesty nearly impossible. I have watched programs with enormous budgets produce reports declaring success while the underlying problems they were designed to address remained entirely intact, often worse than when they started.
I have also watched extraordinary people build extraordinary things on near-zero resources, driven entirely by the conviction that it mattered, and I have watched the ecosystem around them do almost nothing to meet them where they were.
This series is an attempt to name what’s happening clearly, and without softening it for the audience most implicated by it. This is not a think-piece; the working model, the network, and the team won’t make a difference if the structural conditions don’t change. It is an honest account detailing what is broken in Canada’s innovation ecosystem, urging those with the authority to make real changes, to listen, and act accordingly.
What this series covers
Article 1 — The Generation Being Written Off | A generation in their prime with narrowing windows and ladders being pulled up at accelerating rates. Youth unemployment and NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) rates tell only a fraction of the story.
Article 2 — The Black Hole Economy | Canada’s innovation funding doesn’t fail because of bad intentions, it fails because the incentive structures reward the appearance of innovation over its occurrence. Dollars flow in and reports come out, but the ecosystem moves in the wrong direction.
Article 3 — The Grassroots Are Already Here | Across Alberta and Canada, grassroots groups are doing the work the ecosystem claims to support on budgets that would embarrass the programs nominally designed to help them. The problem isn’t energy — it’s infrastructure.
Article 4 — Building the Connective Tissue | What is needed is not more programs, but a way for these programs to connect. An infrastructure layer that unites programs, institutions, and people with the authority to move things forward.
Article 5 — The Mandate Problem | Reform of legacy institutions doesn’t happen from within in the absence of external pressure. Canada needs to make a deliberate bet on the institutions building that pressure, and they need to do it before the people doing that work run the calculation one more time and decide the answer is no.
A note on what comes next
Each article in this series names a structural problem. Each one also points toward the same structural answer — not as a program, not as a recommendation, but as an architecture that follows directly from the diagnosis.
That architecture is the Ecosystem Health Tracker (EHT), being developed by the Network for Applied Technologies (NAT). It is a decentralized coordination layer — not a program, not a database, not another convening body — infrastructure: the shared scaffolding, signal architecture, and neutral brokerage that allow the things already working in Canada’s innovation ecosystem to find each other, interface with institutions, and compound rather than dissipate.
Each article closes with a brief appendix naming the specific entries in the EHT design log most relevant to that article’s argument. The log is how NAT is building EHT in public: an accumulating record of the observations, commitments, and architectural decisions that make up the coordination layer. The white paper accompanying this series contains the full specification. The per-article appendices are there for the reader who wants the mechanism behind the structural claim; they are not required reading for the argument itself.1
Notes and References
References
Government of Canada. (2025, October 15). International investment: Key facts 2024–11.
Bank of Canada. (2024, March 26). Fixing Canada’s productivity problem. https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2024/03/time-to-break-the-glass-fixing-canadas-productivity-problem/
Government of Canada. (2024). Budget 2024: Supporting the next generation of researchers and innovators.
CDAP. (n.d.). Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP).
Government of Canada. (2025). Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s 2025–26 Departmental plan: At a glance. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/planning-performance-reporting/en/departmental-plans/2025-26-departmental-plan/2025-26-departmental-plan-glance
Canada Foundation for Innovation. (2026, March). Major research infrastructure investment positions Canada to lead on Global Innovation. https://www.innovation.ca/news/innovation-fund-march-2026
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Sample from the design log
The three entries below form a short traceback: an observation about how the ecosystem fails, the commitment that follows from it, and the architectural commitment that makes the commitment design-ready. They are illustrative, not exhaustive — the set appears in the per-article appendix and cumulatively in an ongoing Ecosystem Health Tracker Design Log (to be first published May 15th).
O1 — Difference ◇ Observation
Formation: Healthy ecosystems require actors different enough to produce genuine friction. Different disciplines, different registers, different stakes, different clocks. The productive work of an innovation ecosystem depends on that difference being preserved, not smoothed.
Implication: Any coordination layer that treats difference as noise — by compressing it into a shared template, a uniform metric, a common vocabulary pretending to neutrality — reproduces the problem it was trying to solve. A coordination layer must route difference, not eliminate it.
C7 — Signal layer ◈ Commitment
Formation: The coordination layer must be reciprocal by design. Current intake systems extract data from participants without returning anything actionable — a one-way flow that erodes the trust the system needs to function. A signal layer that does not close the loop is not a signal layer; it is surveillance with a better interface.
User: builders, ecosystem operators, institutional partners, funders.
Interaction: consent-based intake at the point of participation. Builders contribute data about their work; the system returns relevance signal (who else is working on this, what has already been tried, which institutional partners have capacity), not surveillance. The layer is visible to the builder first, not to the institution first.
Value back: builders receive signal that affects their next move. Funders receive signal they can trust because it was generated in the act of participation, not filtered through an institution’s self-reporting template. The reciprocity is what makes the signal honest.
A17 — Phase operating model ◆ Architecture
Formation: the coordination architecture must deploy at country scale on a timescale of quarters, not decades. A phased model — Phase I natNetwork, Phase IIA Roundtables, Phase IIB natIgnite, Phase III natNext — lets the ecosystem build the coordination layer through a sequence of tightly-scoped activations rather than a single top-down rollout. Each phase has defined entry criteria, a specific activation mechanism, and explicit exit conditions that determine whether the next phase is warranted.
User: the full ecosystem — builders, institutional partners, funders, government, and the operators running the layer itself.
Interaction: the phase model is the operating frame against which every other EHT entry is calibrated. The signal layer (C7) runs inside it, the scratchpad (A13) is the intake for Phase IIA, the activation mechanism (A15) is the engine that moves ecosystems from one phase to the next. Entry to each phase is by demonstrated work captured in the prior phase, not by credential or invitation.
Value back: the architecture is the argument. An ecosystem that builds through the phase model produces coordination as a byproduct of its own activity, rather than waiting for a top-down plan to arrive. The phase structure is what makes country-scale deployment feasible on the timescale the country actually needs it on.
Eden Redman is the CEO and Executive Director of the Network for Applied Technology. He has been pushing on the same stubborn problems in Canada’s innovation ecosystem for long enough to know exactly where the walls are — and hasn’t stopped pushing.
The Network for Applied Technology (NAT) is a talent-based innovation community. It is dedicated to applied technology across a growing range of high-impact domains. NAT promotes education, skill development, access to specialized tools and hardware, and community. The network connects people across academia, industry, and the entrepreneurial sector. Its goal: drive interdisciplinary, scalable innovation across Alberta and Canada.
Stay tuned for the first article in the series - The Generation Being Written Off - to be released May 7, 2026