Canada: Business Executives

Conference Board Dept: Yet Canada's consistently poor performance at turning ideas into commercially viable products, services and processes indicates that something is missing. Both the entrepreneurial gene and the genetic code for competitive leadership among Canada's business leaders appear to be somewhat suppressed, according to Vancouver Sun. Most business executives have a sense of what innovation is, but they don't have a common definition or a deep understanding of how it plays out within their own organizations. Leaders speak of innovation as the key to making productivity gains that they need to be competitive and, ultimately, profitable in global value chains and markets. Canadian leaders, however, have yet to figure out how to spur and embed innovation in their businesses. According to new Conference Board research, executives - including those in the C-suite - don't appear to see innovation as a pressing challenge that requires immediate attention and in its recent budget, the federal government highlighted innovation as a driver of economic growth. Promotion of the vital importance of innovation is not new. Over the past decade, Canada's policy and business communities have become smitten with it as the key to higher living standards and to our future prosperity. A just-released Global Innovation Policy Index ranks Canada as having one of the world's best public policy frameworks for encouraging innovation including foreign investment, science and research and development, and openness to high-skill immigration policies . Despite policy changes in tax and regulatory regimes intended to pro-mote innovation, Canada languishes in the bottom ranks among its peers in assessments of national innovation performance. The national ranking of 14th among 17 advanced countries in the Conference Board of Canada's 2010 How Canada Performs analysis is merely a recent dismal grade, which, unfortunately, has been the Canadian norm for decades. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.