Canada’s First Innovation Barometer
Successful organizations work hard at creating an internal culture of innovation; to drive sales, stay ahead of the competition, provide better service. Societies, too, need to create cultures of innovation to promote prosperity, foster inclusion, and ensure the ongoing value of institutions. To that end, the Rideau Hall Foundation has partnered with Edelman Canada to launch Canada’s Culture of Innovation Index.
Canadian innovators have made enormous contributions to our country and to the world. Canada’s innovation performance—of our business sector, our health care sector, our higher education institutions, among many others—has been studied and dissected for many years. We have indices of innovation and we can benchmark our innovation performance against any Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development country.
But we have not had a way to systematically measure our national culture of innovation. That is, a way to answer the question, “How pervasive is innovation as a core value and important activity in our everyday lives?”
At the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF), we believe that our common culture regarding innovation is fundamental to supporting our future prosperity and success as a country. Our culture, as expressed in our beliefs, our values, our actions, and our institutions. With this in mind, we set out to measure Canada’s national culture of innovation, to start a discussion on how we, as a nation, can build on our cultural strengths towards innovation, and have an open dialogue about addressing our weaknesses.
The RHF is not alone in this concern. Our work found that Canadians believe that a strong culture of innovation is crucially important; that Canada has unique cultural attributes that can strengthen innovation across our society; but that we have some remarkable cognitive dissonances to deal with in order to get to there.
Canada’s Culture of Innovation Index project is an original survey of how we, as Canadians, approach and value innovation in all spheres of our society. The Index, derived from the survey results, provides guideposts as to how we can all be participants in an innovation-supporting culture. The first thing we found out by combing the literature on national culture and innovation was that there is not a lot of literature specific to this topic. The existing academic work is fascinating, but in its very early stages.
The second thing we found out through consultation is that there is a lot of interest in this question, and a lot of discussion all around the edges of ‘national culture of innovation’— we were not starting from zero. So, with the help of Edelman Canada, specifically the team connected to the Trust Barometer, RHF surveyed a representative group of Canadians in ten provinces, enquiring about their values and beliefs surrounding six top variables of culture and innovation drawn from the existing literature: diversity, collaboration, risk tolerance, creativity, curiosity, and openness to technology.
We also checked these values and beliefs against actions, because culture is not only what you think, it is what you do. Then, we created an index for keeping track of how Canada is doing in each of these dimensions.
This is our inaugural year. We hope that this work creates a framework that allows us to understand how Canada is doing over time from a culture of innovation perspective, and gives us a way to discuss what we must do in the future.
The baseline index score for Canada is 71. That will be our somewhat arbitrary benchmark for ourselves, and this is what we will look at to determine how we perform over time. As we work with others to refine this research, we hope that people concerned about innovation in other countries will join us, and we can benchmark Canada against other societies.
The results of the first Culture of Innovation Index reveal that respondents believe that Canada is blessed with some important strengths—particularly in diversity and collaboration—and some surprising weaknesses, in openness to technology and curiosity. Canadians value innovation and a culture that embraces innovation. They see innovation as an engine for the common good, with the top-ranked answers for how innovation creates ‘good’ in our society tracking closely
with what Canadians typically value: healthier people (43 percent), a growing economy (42 percent), and a cleaner environment (37 percent). Moreover, in an open-ended question about what could be done to make Canada more innovative, promoting a culture of innovation was third most-popular suggestion, ahead of reducing bureaucracy— with only funding and investing in innovation being more commonly cited. So, Canadians themselves think that our culture with regard to innovation matters.
Canadians believe that a strong culture of innovation is crucially important; that Canada has unique cultural attributes that can strengthen innovation across our society; but that we have some remarkable cognitive dissonances to deal with in order to get to there.
Canadians are proud of what they perceive as our society’s strengths in innovation: 34 percent volunteered ‘diversity’ as the aspect of Canada’s identity that makes it uniquely innovative.
Canadians are proud of what they perceive as our society’s strengths in innovation: 34 percent volunteered “diversity” as the aspect of Canada’s identity that makes it uniquely innovative. Not only is this a very Canadian answer, it also tracks well with the business literature on the great value of diversity in improving decision making and other outcomes for a firm. Respondents also placed a high value on areas that are relevant to a thriving culture of innovation—being engaged with others is important, and all Canadians