Alberta has entrepreneurial spirit but falls to a "D" grade on Conference Board's Innovation report card
OTTAWA, May 14, 2018 /CNW/ - In the Conference Board of Canada's How Canada Performs: Innovation report card, Alberta falls to a "D" grade overall and slips to 19th place among 26 comparator jurisdictions (10 provinces and 16 advanced countries), behind Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and the national average.
"Our innovation report card once again confirms that Alberta is a province of self-starting entrepreneurs, as it ranks first among the provinces on both entrepreneurial ambition and enterprise entries," said Paul Preston, Director, Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, The Conference Board of Canada. "But low and falling rankings on a number of indicators, including researchers engaged in R&D, venture capital investment, public R&D and business enterprise R&D leave Alberta near the back-of-the-pack on innovation performance overall."
Highlights
- Alberta earns a "D" grade on innovation and ranks 19th among 26 jurisdictions.
- The province places first among all 26 regions and scores an "A+" for entrepreneurial ambition. It also has the highest enterprise entry rate among the provinces.
- Alberta earns "D-" grades on researchers engaged in R&D and business spending on R&D, falling behind every international jurisdiction on both indicators.
Ten indicators were used to measure the provinces' innovation performance. This includes indicators in three categories:
- innovation capacity—i.e., investments and resources that provide a foundation for research, idea-generation, and insight-sharing (including public R&D, researchers engaged in R&D, and scientific articles);
- innovation activity—i.e., entrepreneurial ambition, investments in ICT and venture capital, and business R&D activity that help to transform ideas into commercialized products, services and processes; and
- innovation results—i.e., evidence of the impact of research, innovation and commercialization as captured in patents, new ventures, and overall labour productivity.
With 17 per cent of Albertans reporting some kind of early-stage entrepreneurial activity, the province places first among all 26 regions and earns an "A+" on entrepreneurial ambition. It also earns an "A" and ranks first among the provinces on enterprise entries.
The province earns a "B" grade on labour productivity, but falls from third to sixth overall on this indicator. Alberta's grade on labour productivity continues to benefit from its resource-intensive economy (with resource riches contributing to its higher GDP per hour worked), but its relative performance has slipped.
Alberta earns a "C" for scientific articles, measured as the number of peer-reviewed scientific articles per million population, and for investment in information and communications technology. With investment in ICT of 2.29 per cent as a share of GDP, Alberta ranks 13th among comparator jurisdictions and slightly above the Canadian average of 2.16 per cent.
Alberta earns "D"s on three other indicators used to assess innovation performance—patents, venture capital investment, and public R&D. With public R&D of only 0.43 per cent of GDP, Alberta ranks 25th among the 26 jurisdictions, ahead of only Ireland.
Alberta gets "D–" grades on researchers engaged in R&D (including researchers employed in business, higher education and government) and business enterprise R&D (BERD). With BERD at 0.59 per cent of GDP, Alberta ranks fourth among the provinces but fares worse than all the peer countries, including the Canadian average of 0.9 per cent.
How Canada Performs is an ongoing research program at The Conference Board of Canada to help leaders identify relative strengths and weaknesses in Canada's socio-economic performance. Six performance domains are assessed: Economy, Education and Skills, Innovation, Environment, Health, and Society.
This is the second time that provincial rankings have been included in the innovation report card. Further details, including information on data sources and the methodology behind the rankings, can be found on the How Canada Performs website.
Paul Preston will present the findings from the How Canada Performs Report Card on Innovation in a live webinar on June 26.
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SOURCE Conference Board of Canada
Yvonne Squires, Media Relations, The Conference Board of Canada, Tel.: 613- 526-3090 ext. 221, E-mail: [email protected]; or Juline Ranger, Director of Communications, The Conference Board of Canada, Tel.: 613- 526-3090 ext. 431, E-mail: [email protected]
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