The Banff Consensus - Twelve principles for integrating Western Canada into the Global Innovation System
by The Centre for Innovation Studies and Calgary Technologies Inc. The full report can be found at www.thecis.ca.
The Banff Innovation Summit Consensus Report addresses how to integrate the creative capabilities of western Canada into the global innovation system.
1. Bring the industry-government relationship into the open
Acknowledge the necessity for cooperation between the public and private sectors and explore creative ways of developing this relationship.
2. Tame the natural resource 'elephant'
Rather than rely on resource industries to innovate or to stimulate innovation, take some of the organizational and financial models that have been applied successfully to innovation in the resource industries and transfer them into a wider range of industry contexts.
3. Focus further up the value-added ladder
Build an explicit value-added expectation into all industry development strategies that envisages each raw material, manufactured product or new idea in terms first of the highest level of value it can produce.
4. Add value by cooperating
Re-orient intra and inter-industry cooperative activities towards pooling research capabilities, bringing complementary knowledge and skills together, leveraging R&D resources and raising the public profile of regional innovation initiatives.
5. Encourage paradigmatic thinking
Envisage innovation in terms of products and service paradigms - systems of complementary inputs and outputs in which innovation in any of the parts affects all of the other parts.
6. Increase choices by creating diversity
Create as much diversity as possible in the knowledge base and in the human resource pool - orient innovation strategies towards new options in both existing and new enterprises and towards exploiting adjacent value chains.
7. Focus upon the enterprise and the market, not the technology
Broaden the perception of innovation beyond the production of technology. Encourage more regional companies in all sectors - particularly services - to innovate by finding value-chain nodes that are linked to the intellectual capatiy of their highly qualified personnel to add value and to capture markets.
8. Link innovation with education and training in all fields and at all levels
Envision the role of the educational system in innovation as a K-to-PhD enterprise, encompassing all possible forms of knowledge and skills transfer and providing as many students as possible to every field of study with practical opportunities to experience and participate in some aspect of the innovation process.
9. Rebalance upstream and downstream investment strategies
Allocate public investment not just to the "Research" side, but also to the "Development" side and in a wider range of industries. Prepare every investor, public and private, to absorb failure as well as success.
10. Match bottom-up initiative with top-down vision
Innovation cannot be stimulated without vision and leadership. We need both top-down and bottom-up initiatives, but top-down initiatives can be effective vehicles for motivating creative resources at the community level.
11. Create a culture of innovation
Create a climate of experimentation and openness to change that inflects every walk of life at every level of society.
12. Start moving to global level by changing local attitudes
Defeat the mindset that we are an "exception" - that global market dynamics must adjust to us and that we can exploit only the knowledge we produce ourselves. Produce a positive balance of trade in ideas and knowledge so that we are retaining more value in the region that we are exporting.
The full report from this conference can be found at www.thecis.ca. Or visit the University of Calgary.
