I’m pleased to co-author this article with Frédéric Bouchard, Doyen de la Faculté des Arts et des Sciences à l’Université de Montréal. Frédéric was Chair of the 2023 Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System.
Frédéric and I have been discussing Canada’s research and innovation system for many years. We were encouraged by the significant investments in research in Budgets 2024 and 2025, and by the commitments made during the last federal election to improve coordination across the research support ecosystem and strengthen Canada’s capacity for challenge-based, or mission-driven, research. Given recent strategic actions from other peer countries, the urgency to follow up on this file has only increased. This jointly authored article is shared on both our accounts to better reach our respective readers.
Frédéric Bouchard https://substack.com/@fredericbouchard
Canada is investing in major projects, energy, defence, artificial intelligence, critical minerals and other strategic capabilities. Emerging health, social and environmental issues will also need to be addressed in renewed fashion with the evolution of our collective needs. But these ambitions cannot be achieved through industrial policy, government spending, procurement or private investments alone. They depend on the discoveries, talent, research infrastructure and scientific communities from which new capabilities emerge and on which our collective vigor depends.
Thankfully, Canada has many of these assets. We train and attract top-notch talent in our universities. Their investigator-driven research is recognized from the community-level where they contribute to improve social services, to the greatest summits of technological innovation where they distinguish themselves with Nobel, Turing and Fields medals alike. In all fields of inquiry, from natural sciences to social sciences and humanities, to biomedical and health research, our scientists and scholars expand what is possible at home and beyond.
Whatever we do moving forward, we must strengthen investigator-led university research and the foundation it provides for all subsequent development. But such research excellence however necessary will not be sufficient to buttress our collective needs.
What we don’t have is a science and innovation strategy and a mechanism for mobilizing at scale researchers, infrastructure, data, government and external partners around emergent challenges and needs. The major question of our time is how do we mobilize our talent more effectively to improve our well-being, our security and our economy?
We are not alone in asking ourselves this question, but our peer and competitor countries have been hard at work to find ways to leverage their best minds to improve their conditions. Investments are of course a crucial element of their strategy, but the true difference-maker is how they view and organize their research capacity as a pillar supporting their national interest and the well-being of their citizens.
A few recent examples:
The United Kingdom’s ARIA is testing a novel model. Its “opportunity spaces” identify areas where breakthroughs could create new capabilities. Programme directors build research portfolios, while Activation Partners develop talent networks, translational infrastructure, engineering capacity, and new organizations around them. ARIA has also sought to attract global organizations to the United Kingdom and strengthen the domestic ecosystem surrounding its priorities.
The French Republic’s Cour des comptes (roughly their auditor general) in a recent report (« Les partenariats entre la recherche publique et les entreprises » July 2026) points to the fragmentation of the science and innovation architecture, the lack of organizing innovation challenges and the lack of connections between public and private R&D.
The US Chips and Science Act (2022) aimed at ensuring the scientific strength of American Science with an emphasis on the superconductor discovery and manufacturing chain; it did so by increasing linkages between university and private R&D while also better supporting investigator-driven research in cognate fields. Sadly these smart policies were repealed and followed by aggressive actions against research universities. But even with the change in attitude towards universities, many of the science investments were reinstated by Congress and other approaches were deployed to leverage research. With the American Genesis Mission, more than 15 federal agencies are contributing funding, specialized datasets, scientific facilities and technical capabilities to a common effort applying AI to major science and technology challenges. The initiative connects national laboratories, universities, companies and advanced computing around priorities tied to economic and national security.
These initiatives offer useful lessons for Canada, but they should not be treated as ready-made blueprints, and their long-term effectiveness remains to be demonstrated. The recent White House science report, in particular, warrants careful scrutiny and prudence. Its treatment of university-based research, and basic research in particular, understates the contribution both have historically made to scientific progress, technological innovation and long-term economic and social returns.
And yet beyond national, ideological, and implementation differences, the directionality of their questioning remains instructive. Countries are using research challenges (often referred to as mission-driven research) to mobilize their scientific systems and develop strategic capabilities: Science (broadly construed) is understood as a pillar of national interest and developed as such.
Canada’s missing mobilizing architecture
Canada’s questioning on these issues is ongoing. Notably, the Bouchard report1 concluded that while Canada has great scientists, researchers and scholars and that our existing funding agencies do great work to support investigator-led research, increased support remains necessary.
Moreover, Canada’s research-support system lacks coordination, cohesion and agility to effectively leverage scientific research for greater impact. This makes it difficult to support groundbreaking interdisciplinary research, ambitious international collaborations and the type of research and innovation challenges on which our wellbeing, security and prosperity will ever more depend.
This fragmentation has a cost and diminishes impact: without an overarching strategy or ongoing coordination, research and innovation actors are funded and governed through separate autonomous processes and mandates. Infrastructure is financed on one track. Researchers and projects are supported on another. Government strategies, industrial programs and procurement follow their own mandates and timelines. Coordination is expected to emerge organically afterward. To no one’s surprise, such coordination occurs only with great difficulty.
So, while we possess strong research assets, we lack the means to mobilize them at scale to bolster collective capability. As the Report and others argue, adding a challenge-based mechanism would help coordinate our assets and increase economic, social and other quality of life impacts.
A challenge identifies a difficult problem that no single researcher, discipline, institution or program can solve alone. It builds upon and complements investigator-led research. For that reason, universities would remain the foundation, producing discoveries, talent and deep expertise. Challenges would provide a mechanism for building upon that foundation when collective mobilization is required. It would connect researchers to infrastructure and data, involve relevant communities, public and private institutions, and sustain a portfolio of work over time.
The objective cannot be to reorient all of the scientific enterprise toward government priorities. It is to create an architecture through which Canada can identify important challenges, assemble the relevant assets, mobilize its strengths and build capabilities that persist beyond individual projects. The Bouchard Report offered a diagnosis and some possible remedies. There are various ways to do this but whatever the preferred way, inaction has an increasing cost.
The Prime Minister’s Davos Speech emphasized the need to develop our own sovereign capacities and the new partnerships to leverage them in ways coherent with our interest and values. Sovereign capacity in science does not mean working alone and foregoing science diplomacy. Sovereign capacity in the innovation space does not mean producing every technology domestically. True sovereign capacity means possessing enough knowledge, talent, infrastructure and institutional capacity to make informed choices, collaborate effectively with allies and control capabilities in order to sustain our prosperity, security and wellbeing in these turbulent times.
Bouchard, Frédéric; Chan, Yolande; Patry, Gilles; Rossant, Janet; Schafer, Laurel; Singh, Baljit; Timmons, Vianne « Rapport du comité consultatif sur le système fédéral de soutien à la recherche / Report of the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System » 2023 Gouvernement du Canada ISBN 978-0-660-48161-6
Thank you Robert. I fully agree. But why do we only turn to recent examples and proposals in other countries when we have a challenges model that has run successfully in Canada for 15 years and is still going strong. Grand Challenges Canada, funded in part by the Government of Canada, has supported 1700 innovations in more than 100 countries and has saved and improved millions of lives. It has funded hundreds of researchers and entrepreneurs at Universities and companies in Canada. It’s the closest thing we have to an ARPA/DARPA/ARIA/Mission/Challenge model in Canada. I have estimated the 25-year fiscal value of a domestic ARPA-like model health/life sciences in Canada at $68 billion, including a $23 billion premium over delivering the elements separately (link below). We need to learn from our own lessons in Canada too.
A contrary view… You ask: “The major question of our time is how do we mobilize our talent more effectively to improve our well-being, our security and our economy?” How? You make no reference to the need for more sophisticated management skills. No one in Canada seems to talk about management or the contribution our management school researchers should be adding. So many claim to be experts in entrepreneurship and innovation who have never read a textbook in either.
Perhaps you can explore Gary Hamel’s (London Business School) new paper: Searching for Significance: The Case for Reimagining Management Research. He authored innovation books and papers for 30 years. He argues that the greatest innovation in the past 150 years was large-scale industrial management. Without this, nothing would have happened. But his main point is what research is funded today. He offers data from US National Science Foundation. In 2018, US corporations spent $4.7 billion funding university research. Of this, business and management research captured a minuscule 1%.
What is spent in Canada to study innovation management? Anything? I can't name a single interesting paper on public-sector innovation or private-sector innovation from Canadian academia. Linked to Hamel’s point… if such research is happening, it isn't translated into insights, models, and tools for executives. (FYI, I taught in a Master's in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Commercialization in Australia in the 2010.) Keep in mind, the Canadian Council of Academies published a paper in 2018 on the need and opportunity for our universities to teach innovation management. Perhaps it is worth exploring https://www.strategicmanagementreview.net/assets/articles/Hamel%20and%20Birkinshaw.pdf