Lack of innovation isn’t Canada’s problem—it’s the lack of adoption

We believe this should be the golden age of medicine, driven by Canadian innovations.

Health-care innovation has never been greater than it is today. Diagnostics, drugs, medical devices, procedures, data analysis, vaccines, and other products and services are all improving at an unprecedented pace. Much of this health innovation is driven by the creativity and hard work of Canadians. Precision medicine is within our reach, starting with faster and more accurate diagnosis, and ending with vastly improved individual and societal outcomes.

Yet Canada continues to struggle with providing every form of care—prenatal, paediatric, family, emergency, surgical, cancer, geriatric, chronic, long-term, and even palliative. More of the same isn’t helping, and, unless we Canadians change our approach to the adoption of innovation, our current trajectory is ominous and our health-care system unsustainable. 

Canada has ample creativity and invention, but we’ve been chronically ineffective in actually adopting innovative new products and services.

Canadian scientists and inventors are world-class, as are the startups they found and the institutions that support them. Canada is described as an “innovation economy,” governments at every level trumpet “innovation strategies,” and new “innovation funding” announcements. Yet we’re still not solving health-care system challenges, and we see relatively few successful health-oriented Canadian businesses. 

When was the last time you personally benefited from the use of a Canadian innovation? That being something discovered in Canada, validated in Canada, made in Canada, and widely used in Canadian health care. It’s likely you’ll recall innovations like insulin (1922), pacemakers (1950), or cancer radiotherapy (1951). However, the most recent of those is 75 years ago. Why does nothing more recent leap to your mind?

We believe it is because Canada suffers from a longtime deficit in “adoption” of our domestic innovations. Without naming names, there are many examples such as the following: 

• A British Columbia doctor invents a medical device that will improve patient outcomes by reducing surgical time and risk. There is no clear path to make sales to Canadian hospitals, so the invention is sold to a conglomerate that will manufacture abroad and isn’t focused on selling into Canada.  
• An Ontario scientist develops a new test to more rapidly and accurately diagnose a disease. Yet lab procurement is bound by long-term contracts to keep using antiquated technology. With no local use, the assay is sold to a multinational, which makes it abroad and sells it elsewhere. 

These situations happen repeatedly across our Canadian innovation ecosystem. Instead of encouraging early adoption here, we force our innovators to head far from home. 

An idea is not innovation. A patent is not innovation. A grant application is not innovation. Innovation is what happens when an idea becomes a product, when a product becomes a business selling in Canada, and when that business helps patients, creates jobs, drives economic growth, and generates societal value. 

Our policy frameworks treat innovation as an end in itself: scientists innovated, sold out, and now more people outside of Canada are healthy and have jobs. Well done, supposedly. So, what then is our solution? 

We believe Canada must start celebrating commercialization and manufacturing just as much as innovation. Let’s support companies that are creating commercial-scale production—factories matter just as much as lab benches, and they employ a lot more tax-paying, skilled professionals. Policy decisions at every level of government should, therefore, be supporting greater access to debt and equity capital by companies actually commercializing innovations. 

Canada must also have crystal-clear pathways for our innovations to be used nationwide. Our health-care systems should be the “earliest adopter” of Canadian innovations. We must proudly support the widespread adoption of every type of Canadian-made product at-scale for our straining publicly funded health-care systems, for which adopting innovation is the only path for survival.

Canadians have imagination, skill, and dedication as proven by our many innovative startups. What Canada now needs are policies that effectively encourage scale-ups by providing access to growth capital and domestic earliest-adopter customers. Actions, not words, will define the next chapters of Canada’s innovation and adoption story—and the sustainable future of our health-care system and our broader prosperity depend on actions today. Our success will be measured by what we scale up, manufacture, and use locally, not just by what we invent.

Cameron Groome is CEO and president of Microbix (MBX on TSX), and a board director of iFabric (IFA on TSX), Illumisoft (UVC on TSXV), and Naegis Pharmaceuticals (privately-held). All are innovative life sciences companies headquartered in Canada.

Dr. Ken Hughes is COO of Microbix, co-founder and advisory board member of PlantForm Corporation (privately-held), and a board director of Medtech Canada, the national association leading efforts to develop and advance Canada’s innovative medtech industry.

The Hill Times