Both authors have been discussing issues of research and innovation together for years. We were gladdened to see some of the significant investments in budgets 2024 and 2025. We were also glad to see during the last election the commitment to better support our scientists and innovators through better coordination of the research support ecosystem and the need to support 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 blogpost is shared on both our accounts to better reach our respective readers.
Robert Asselin https://substack.com/@robertasselin
and
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.
photo of the 2024 solar eclipse at the Mont Mégantic Observatory (by F.Bouchard)
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
Fully agree. Have you seen the recent Lloyds report on importance of university infrastructure to fostering innovation and economic growth? Really great report and something as relevant here as in the UK.
https://www.lloydsbank.com/assets/assets-business-banking/pdfs/lb-innovation-foundations-report.pdf