Innovative policy will shape the future of Canada – and has the potential to transform the world.
Mitacs Skills for Innovation
The Mitacs Skills for Innovation project will deliver a series of reports examining the skills needed for different innovation activities in the Canadian economy. The project leverages Mitacs’s unique ability to survey employer organizations and interns involved in a wide array of innovation projects and offers granular insights into the specific skills required by individuals and organizations for different kinds of innovation, as well as their different stages, and activities.
In the first report of the Skills for Innovation series, Creig Lamb and Dr. Daniel Munro (Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship and Shift Insights) provide clarity on the technical and professional skills needed for different kinds of innovation. Their examination of the survey responses of organizations and interns involved in Mitacs programming about the skills needed to innovate further reveals several critical skill gaps in the Canadian economy. These insights are used to develop a set of recommendations for employers, workers, and skills training organizations designed to sharpen Canada’s skills advantage and improve its innovation performance.
Download the report here:
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Mitacs Innovation Intermediaries
The Mitacs Innovation Intermediaries project provides an in-depth look at how Mitacs works in practice to support research and innovation through academic-industry collaboration. Innovation intermediaries are actors in innovation ecosystems that support collaboration between two or more parties, during various stages of the innovation process.
The project provides a new opportunity to bring together the collective knowledge, wisdom, and experience of Mitacs experts across Canada, to offer a fresh understanding of “what works” when mediating and enabling academic-industry innovation in practice. Project insights will also be informed by the views and experiences of academics and businesses who have received Mitacs support.
Bridging the Gap: The Role of Innovation Intermediaries in Canada is the first of two reports on innovation intermediaries. It examines the “what, why, and how” of innovation intermediaries: what they are, why they play a role in supporting innovation, and how they function. It draws on examples of intermediary practice in Canada, with a particular focus on their role in supporting collaboration between Canadian academic institutions and organizations.
Download the report here:
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Joining the Dots: The Role of Mitacs as an Innovation Intermediary in Canada is the second and final report from the Mitacs Innovation Intermediaries project. This report investigates the way in which Mitacs, one of Canada’s largest national innovation intermediaries, acts to support and enable research and innovation (R&I) between academia and industry.
The aims of this report are twofold. Part one “zooms in” to explore how Mitacs works to deliver three universal innovation intermediary functions – creating linkages between innovating organizations, delivering supporting services, and building strategic capability in the innovation ecosystem. Part two then “zooms out” to join the dots between these individual practice-focused insights. Three overarching strategic themes are highlighted and explored.
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Mitacs Innovation Challenge
The Mitacs Innovation Challenge project examines application and evaluation materials from the Mitacs Business Strategy Internship (BSI) program to better understand what barriers are limiting the innovation performance of Canadian SMEs.
In this report, we find that talent access is a key issue inhibiting SME innovation performance throughout Canada’s innovation ecosystem. We further explore how skilled talent acquired through innovation-related WIL programs can help unlock the innovation potential of Canadian SMEs, encourage product and market diversification strategies, technological upgrading, and the development of more sustainable growth trajectories. Based on our findings, we argue that Canadian governments must do more to leverage their strengths by connecting PSE talent with SMEs through the creation of more innovation-based WIL internships in the Canadian innovation ecosystem.
Download the report here:
English | Français
