British Columbia Loses Substantial Ground in Conference Board's Innovation Report Card
Province falls from a "B" to a "D" grade and slips from 10th to 17th place overall.
OTTAWA, May 14, 2018 /CNW/ - British Columbia earns a "D" overall and falls from 10th to 17th out of 26 jurisdictions in The Conference Board of Canada's latest How Canada Performs: Innovation report card. This marks a dramatic change from the province's strong showing and "B" grade on the previous innovation report card.
"B.C. has fallen in the Conference Board's innovation report card rankings, pointing to the need for improvement in a number of key areas," said Paul Preston, Director of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, The Conference Board of Canada. "The province continues to perform well on indicators of entrepreneurship, but has slipped relative to international peers on four key indicators of innovation capacity and activity and continues to lag on others."
HIGHLIGHTS
- British Columbia earns a "D" grade overall on innovation and ranks 17th among 26 jurisdictions.
- B.C. ranks third among all comparator regions on entrepreneurial ambition and venture capital investment.
- The province lost ground on four indicators and now shows three "D" and two "D-" grades on its report card.
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.
British Columbia receives one "A+", one "A", one "B", two "C"s, three "D"s, and two "D-" grades.
B.C. gets an "A+" on the entrepreneurial ambition indicator (the percentage of the working age population who report being engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity). With 17 per cent of British Columbians reporting some kind of early-stage entrepreneurial activity, B.C. places third overall, behind only Ontario and Alberta, and outperforms the Canadian average (16.7 per cent). B.C.'s next highest grade is an "A" on enterprise entries—an improvement over the "B" grade it received on the previous report card.
B.C. earns its only "B" on the venture capital indicator—an indicator on which it previously received an "A". Although venture capital investment in the province declined only slightly over the previous report card, the dramatic improvement of the United States widened the gap and nudged B.C. and others down the grade scale. The province still ranks third among all jurisdictions on venture capital.
On scientific articles, measured as the number of peer-reviewed scientific articles per million population, B.C. falls from a "B" to a "C" grade. With 2,661 articles per million population, the province ranks 9th among the 20 jurisdictions for whom data are available and outperforms the Canadian average (2,437), but lags far behind leading country Switzerland with 4,619 articles. B.C. retains its "C" grade on public R&D, but continues to perform better than only four jurisdictions, including the U.K., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ireland.
B.C. earns "D" grades on ICT investment, patents and labour productivity. The province previously earned a "C" on ICT investment, but continues to experience a near decade-long decline in ICT investment, from 2.44 per cent as a share of GDP in 2008 to just 1.73 per cent by 2015. British Columbia's "D" grades on patents and labour productivity match its weak performance on the previous report card.
The province earns its worst grades, "D–", on researchers engaged in R&D and business enterprise R&D (BERD). On the researchers indicator, B.C. actually improved its absolute performance—increasing from 7.7 to 8.6 researchers engaged in R&D per 1,000 employed in the labour force—but fell behind the worst-performing international jurisdictions, Switzerland and Netherlands, thereby earning it the lower grade. Similarly, although British Colombia's BERD increased from 0.7 to 0.74 per cent as a share of GDP, it continues to trail all international jurisdictions.
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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