There is a crowd of policy entrepreneurs in Canada – mostly but not entirely Liberal, mostly but not entirely based in Ottawa – who have really cottoned on to the whole notion of innovation.  Like many of us who have despaired over successive governments’ lack of cluefulness on this issue, they are dissatisfied with the status quo.  Unfortunately, these people are currently marching with wholly unjustified confidence towards policies that are largely buzzword-driven.

It’s not just this ludicrous notion of a “Canadian DARPA”: now the policy-nerd airwaves are full of talk about “Moonshots” and “mission-based innovation”.  For convenience, Ottawa’s Public Policy Forum and Toronto’s Brookfield Institute have managed to combine these terms into a single argot-tastic project known as Canada’s Moonshot: Charting A Mission-Oriented Innovation Strategy.

Let me explain why this is nonsense on stilts.

First of all, what is a “moonshot” in innovation?  In contemporary Canadian innovation buzzword bingo, it seems to mean “do something big”.  What, exactly, we are meant to go big about is unclear, but whatever we are doing now isn’t cutting it, so why not go big (“we must do something, this is something, etc.”).  And after all, isn’t there a big literature on moonshots which suggest that they often work out well, have lots of spin off effects, etc?

The problem here is that this argument relies on people failing to understand that what the literature describes as a moonshot and what the buzzword bingo types claim as moonshots are two different things.  A moonshot, by definition, is something that a country does in response to a truly existential threat.  The Manhattan Project was a Moonshot to end the bloodiest war the world has ever known.  The Apollo project was a literal moonshot pushed by the fact that the Americans thought they were about to lose global technical pre-eminence, particularly in rocketry.  Give or take some multilateralism and the participation of the private sector, COVID vaccines might be considered a moonshot too.

But Moonshots are a by-product of existential threats (a point made in detail and extremely ably by Mark Zachary Taylor in his book The Politics of Innovation, which I reviewed back here).  Countries don’t do moonshots because they wake up one morning and say “hey, let’s do big thing”, they do it because they are deeply terrified of what will happen if they don’t invest heavily in this one complex task.  Canada, though, does not face any existential threats.  The best the moonshot types can come up with is weak sauce like “saving health care” (a case for raising taxes, maybe, but not for an innovation program) or worse, something like “wouldn’t it be great if we were #1 in AgTech” (DARPA for Tractors).  So, a moonshot isn’t a realistic option.  In fact, if we could shoot the word moonshot into the Sun, that would probably improve innovation discourse in Canada enormously.

But what about “mission-oriented innovation strategies”?  Well this is a phrase coined by policy entrepreneur Mariana Mazzucato, who is most famous for her book The Entrepreneurial State in which she re-discovered Kenneth Arrow’s ideas about the public role in subsidizing research and then proceeded to mangle the concept by claiming that the subsidization of basic research meant that the state was actually an entrepreneur (big hint here: if you have the power of taxation, you are not meaningfully at financial risk of…well, almost anything, and so cannot possibly be an entrepreneur).  “Mission-oriented” innovation is her new shtick.

But the thing is that if you read what Mazzucato means by this term (and I think the best summary is probably this article), it’s pretty clear that what she is articulating is less an innovation process than a theory of how governments should be organized internally (fewer silos, more freedom to innovate) and how it should interact with the private sector (co-structuring markets and then getting out of the way.  Read this document, which Mazzucato helped produce for the Inter-American Development Bank, where she enumerates a number of “mission-driven innovation policies” in Latin America, and where she singles out policies like reducing diabetes in Mexico, or improving education in the slums of Medellin. 

There is nothing wrong in principle with what she is advocating, but it absolutely not innovation policy in the way we define this term in Canada.  And more to the point it is the antithesis of a “moonshot” approach.  One is about pouring money monomaniacally towards a particular technological objective while the other is largely about harnessing a wide variety of public and private actors to contribute to solutions on broader societal challenges.  More broadly, one is about technology and the other is not.

It takes a deeply impoverished national discourse on innovation to think these two ideas belong in the same room, let alone the same sentence.  And yet here we are.  Welcome to Canada.

Look, innovation policy has some basic tennets.  We have here in Canada the world’s greatest theoretician of innovation, namely the University of Toronto’s Dan Breznitz.  He has written several books – most recently Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World – which lay out a few very simple principles for inclusive growth.  First,  expand flows of knowledge, demand and inputs between the local and global level.  Second, increase the supply of public and semi-public goods which fuel innovation (mainly: high-quality education/training facilities and community facilities), and third, build local ecosystems that reinforce firm-level benefits of the first two fundamentals.

That’s it, that’s all.  It’s not hard to understand.  The question is why we don’t simply do it and stick to it instead of screwing around with ideas like DARPA for Tractors.

Or to put it another way: policy entrepreneurs are going to policy entrepreneur, but why is anyone in Ottawa bothering to listen to them?