Same old saw, just duller

Last week saw the National Summit on Innovation and Learning, sponsored by the Departments of Industry and Human Resources Development and hosted by ministers Allan Rock and Jane Stewart (yes, the Jane Stewart of the $1 billion in 459 unaccountable grants). It marked the culmination of a six-month “engagement process” on the subject.

Apparently there’s not enough innovation and learning, and the country ought to do more.

Readers are forgiven for thinking this is yet another confab of government, business, non-governmental organizations, and policy junkies, and that the results were a foregone conclusion. The history of stunts like these is pretty uniform, and the course of new ones pretty predictable. Ministers eager to carve a public profile, senior civil servants with empires to build, businesses seeking handouts and organizations seeking causes: give them a couple of days in a conference centre and the result has usually been recommendations about the brave new world that will pass us by unless we take the bull by the horns and push his nose into the trough.

It is “innovation” that has historically been the buzzword. It serves the same purpose among the chattering classes that “new and improved” did among 50s-era hausfrauen buying detergent. It comes with similar promises about building the economic base, sustaining our health care system, maintaining income security, and getting our clothes the whitest. (Serves you right for letting the government get hold of your blue socks.)

Loose talk about “innovation” — and there is rarely any other kind — usually comes round to bashing the resource industries. Careless politicians and commentators, and occasional economists who really should know better, take as their measure of Canadian innovativeness the proportion of wealth created in commodity businesses.

Dear me! People actually pay us to hew wood and draw water! The shame of being only good enough to shovel! This is bunkum that has no macroeconomic meaning, and academic economists who actually know what they’re talking about correctly label it “structure snobbery.”

It is always tricky to extrapolate from the micro- to the macro-economy, but an employed miner is better off than a displaced HTML programmer, and a profitable resource company is better off than a bankrupt telecom. We guess a healthy resource economy may be better for a country than a heavily subsidized tech sector — not that prosperity in one sector excludes it in another, though to hear some innovation gurus talk, you’d suppose it did.

Fact is, the love affair with “innovation” is mostly a veil placed over governments’ compulsion to tinker with the economy and over sectoral and regional grabs for funding. It is one thing, and a good thing, to provide government support for basic research, through publicly funded universities or through agencies such as the National Research Council. It is entirely another to place bets on sectors or businesses using public money, and to create an artificial economy in places where the real one fears to tread.

And economic innovation always seems to mean high technology, whether a market likes it or not. (Have you forgotten about Telidon? Lucky for you. Maybe you missed techno-pop music as well.) Economic planners are perpetually convinced there is a new industrial revolution around the corner. Every few centuries, they’re right. But at an innovation summit, the seductive power of the new invention trumps common sense every time.

That kind of thinking also leads people to see innovation anywhere there is a blinking cursor. So many of the “innovations” of the bubble years were simply retail-sector business plans with a keyboard at each end. Then the telecoms boom, and the bust that followed it, were principally exercises in building overcapacity. (Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek may have been, in modern economic terms, certifiably nuts; but they did identify businesses’ tendency to buy more paint than there were walls to put it on, and the unhappy consequences that would flow from that.)

Yet in the proposals that came out of the government’s summit meeting, we find the same things that excited true believers in the dot-com age. “Accelerate broadband access.” “Further develop Canada’s national cluster strategy.” Add to that some of the same things that excited Pierre Trudeau and pork-barrel cronies like Bryce Mackasey and Alastair Gillespie 30 years ago: “Target regional development activities.” This is where these people’s minds are. More to the point, this is where their minds have stayed.

“Innovation” strategies have been around for a long, long time. They have a great future. And they always will.