Canada’s missing ingredient: creativity

The Edmonton Journal‘s Ray Turchansky interviewed a local economist out with a new book about what’s missing from the Canadian economy: creativity.

Speaking with Alberta Treasury Branch‘s chief economist Todd Hirsch, Turchansky notes that for far too long, we have relied on our status as “hewers of wood, drawers of water” to fuel our prosperity (no pun intended, Alberta). Even without the current resource & commodities boom that’s driving Western Canada and keeping the country as a whole afloat during these difficult economic times, its been evident for quite some time that Canada suffers from a “productivity gap” compared to our southern neighbors.

This gap is literally visible in the US’s consistently higher GDP per capita and I think it’s also intuitively felt when companies and talented workers migrate south to get a bigger bang for their buck, though admittedly, this gap now seems to be closing for the first time ever.

(It ain’t because we’re suddenly innovating– a contemporaneous piece in the Globe and Mail cites the usual frustrations SMEs have in Canada: small venture capital market, taxation structures, a lack of coordination between public & private agencies, few mentors and weak commercialization processes.)

Much of this is a result of our own complacency.  Hirsch, who looks a bit like Rick Moranis with windswept hair, says “we need to stop asking the government to make us productive and creative.” He & Robert Roach have authored a book that tackles this issue: The Boiling Frog Dilemma: Saving Canada From Economic Decline. The title’s a bit alarmist but he does make a few salient points.

Hirsch offers some interesting anecdotes around creativity and the subsequent lack thereof, such as our increasingly rigid educational system (when “our crayons are taken away”) and the Overseas Experience (i.e. “Gap Year” ) that Australians and New Zealanders regularly take in between finishing school and starting work to refresh and rejuvenate themselves.

This is not to say that Canadians aren’t creative–witness everything from the invention of insulin to the construction of the Canadarm to Research In Motion–but for the most part Hirsch says we are too comfortable in our abundance.  And it’s not like the opportunities aren’t there: as one of the world’s energy hotspots, Hirsch says Alberta should be leaders in areas of relevance such as carbon capture & storage technology.

(my favourite example)

Interestingly, the article finishes by looking at what he considers the three components of applied creativity: invention, innovation & design.  Innovation is a tired, overused term while design is the easiest and most economical to build upon, according to Hirsch. (I would posit that design itself is in danger of being beaten into a cliché. Time for a new word but more on that later).

He cites the world’s number one firm as an example of how to “do” it right: “Apple doesn’t really invent anything, it just takes existing technology and adds tremendous design that people connect with.”