Innovation crusader shops for R&D ideas
OTTAWA • When Canadian Business magazine named Canadian Tire as the country’s most innovative company in 2016, John Knubley had to find out why.
Knubley is the deputy minister to Navdeep Bains, the federal minister for innovation, science, and economic development. Since the Trudeau government took office in 2015, Bains has pretty much talked non-stop about how it is his mission to make the Canadian economy a more innovative one.
And since Knubley is Bains’ top bureaucrat, it has been Knubley’s job to figure out just what government policies can be put in place to help Bains and his government achieve that objective.
Knubley, a career bureaucrat who was promoted in 2012 by the Harper Conservatives to become deputy minister of what was then known as Industry Canada, was by Bains’ side for recent visits to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The theme for both men at both shows was innovation.
But the theme of innovation has dominated Knubley’s professional life since the Liberals took over government.
Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the National Post using federal access to information laws show that Knubley has hardly left a stone unturned over the last year searching for ways to flesh out the federal government’s so- called Innovation Agenda.
Late last summer, Knubley wanted to meet with someone f rom Canadian Tire because the company had been “investing heavily in its digital strategy to help compete with emerging disruptive retailers, at home and abroad.” For Knubley and the bureaucrats that advise Bains, “This meeting could provide an opportunity to gain insights into Canadian Tire Corporation ( CTC)’s digital technology innovation and investment plans and initiatives,” according to a briefing note prepared for Knubley.
“( CTC) could provide important insights into ways government can create conditions that can help support the advancement and adoption of next generation technologies in Canada so companies like CTC can continue to compete with emerging disruptive retailers at home and abroad,” the note said.
Eric Simmons, Canadian Tire’s associate vice- president of automotive innovation, was dispatched to meet with Knubley.
We don’t know exactly what was said — it was a private meeting after all and neither side would say anything about it — but we do have some hints as to what Knubley and, by extension, the government were searching for.
“The Canadian public is looking for a bold new blueprint to restore shared prosperity,” was the message pollster Frank Graves was delivered to Knubley when they met on Oct. 11.
In the search for that blueprint, Knubley and deputy ministers from other government departments took a long look at Israel.
On Aug. 30, Knubley met with Israel’s ambassador to Canada Rafael Barak. Later, a committee of deputy ministers that included Knubley, met with a delegation from Israel.
Reviewing briefing notes prepared for those exchanges, the Canadian side is clearly admiring of the fact that no country in the world spends more on research and development than Israel. Israel’s R&D spending is 4.2 per cent of its GDP. Canada spends just 1.7 per cent.
Knubley and his officials were wondering if there was some way to hitch Canadian companies to Israel’s culture of innovation, particularly in computers, telecommunications, clean technology and cybersecurity — all areas where Israeli firms are global leaders.
“Spillover benefits from such collaboration could also include increased innovation in these industries, as well as increased opportunities for commercialization of Canadian products and services,” says another briefing note.
Knubley has met separately with executives from BlackBerry, Bell Canada and General Motors. He sat down with legendary Quebec entrepreneur Charles Sirois to talk about Sirois’s latest project called NorthStar, a project that combines advanced data analytics with satellite imagery. Where, Knubley wanted to know from all of these executives, could the federal government fit in?
He probed academics and policy wonks in one- on- one meetings throughout the summer and fall of 2016.
There was, for example, a meeting with Dan Breznitz, co-director of the innovation policy lab at the University of Toronto. Chris Lumb, the CEO of an Edmonton- based technology company incubator, provided his insights.
Knubley also took advice on innovation from Peter Nicholson, now the President of the Council of Canadian Academies, but once a former senior policy adviser to Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Nicholson had just completed a paper outlining how every federal government since 1911 had failed at trying to make Canada more innovative. “Innovative is not a prominent feature of this country’s global brand,” Nicholson wrote in that paper.
Knubley and Bains seem determined to change that.
THIS MEETING COULD PROVIDE AN OPPORTUNITY TO GAIN INSIGHTS INTO CANADIAN TIRE CORPORATION (CTC)’S DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION AND INVESTMENT PLANS AND INITIATIVES. — BRIEFING NOTE PREPARED FOR JOHN KNUBLEY