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Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post

“We spread around incentives like peanut butter — evenly — and that has a very negative set out of outcomes associated with it,” said Anthony Lacavera, founder of Globalive Holdings, a Toronto-based investment firm, and of WIND Mobile. WIND began as a startup telecommunications firm that Lacavera later sold for $1.6 billion to Shaw Communications.

In his book ‘How We Can Win: And What Happens to Us and Our Country If We Don’t’, a study of Canadian innovation policy, Lacavera points to the various pitfalls that have hindered innovative Canadian companies from growing into multinational “anchor” firms.

“Business is about winners, and we need in Canada to start recognizing that we need to pick winners, and we need to help our companies become global success stories,” he said.

Lacavera is advocating a return to an older form of innovation policy that focuses more on companies or specific areas rather than laboratories, and making bigger bets on fewer innovative firms. In short, that would mean taking a far less egalitarian, or perhaps “Canadian,” approach to innovation.

“Structurally, we are trying to excel in too many digital and knowledge economy areas,” Lacavera said. “It’s the Canadian style — spread it around, give everyone a shot. And then no one wins.”

Experts have long called for an overhaul that could simplify Canadian innovation policy, starting with a streamlining of the various programs aimed at supporting promising companies. Ottawa went at least part way toward that goal in its 2018 budget, after promising to whittle down the total number of federal grant programs from 92 to around 35.