Overcoming Barriers to Policy Change: The Politics of Canada’s Innovation Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation aims to explain why Canada’s approach to innovation policy has remained so stable over time despite prolonged underperformance in stimulating private sector innovation. Curiously, after decades of declining business expenditure on research and development (BERD) and numerous attempts at policy reform to address it, Canada’s innovation policy mix continues to rely much more than its OECD peer countries on indirect, supply-side, and neutral policy instruments such as research and development (R&D) tax credits and academic research funding (OECD, 2022a; OECD, 2021). Canada’s 2017 Innovation and Skills Plan provides the ideal critical case to ascertain the barriers constraining policy change because despite its stated intention of achieving ‘transformational’ change by adopting direct, demand-side, and targeted instruments (such as R&D grants and procurement), it nonetheless resulted in incremental change to Canada’s overall innovation policy mix (ISED, 2019; OECD, 2021). Analyzing the design and implementation of the Innovation and Skills Plan via public documents and confidential interviews with 143 civil servants, firms, and other experts involved in this policy process reveals how three perennial institutional elements of Canada’s innovation policy process produced this incremental outcome: 1) low coordination across institutional silos within the government; 2) ad hoc and siloed institutional mechanisms for private-public policy coordination; and 3) the politics of regionalism, as institutionalized in Canada’s Westminster system. The primary empirical contribution of this dissertation is illustrating how these three barriers functioned to constrain the adoption of targeted, direct grant/contribution programs like the Innovation Superclusters Initiative and the Strategic Innovation Fund, as well as the demand-side procurement program, Innovative Solutions Canada. This finding confirms the hypothesis synthesized from previous Canadian political economy research that these three entrenched institutional barriers function to frustrate Canada’s adoption of activist industrial policy (Atkinson & Coleman, 1989; Chandler, 1986; French, 1984; Jenkin 1983). This project also contributes to the nascent comparative literature on the politics of innovation policy, highlighting how country-specific institutions make changing innovation policy mixes an inherently path dependent and political - rather than merely technocratic - exercise (Breznitz, 2007; Flanagan, Uyarra, & Laranja, 2011; Taylor, 2016).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".