National Competitiveness

The 2025 “South Meets North” Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance (GTIPA) Annual Summit will bring together leading local and international experts in Buenos Aires to exchange effective strategies in innovation-related policies.

Over the past decade, Europe has ceded leadership in innovation to the U.S. and China. Now, the U.S. must learn from the EU’s missteps to ensure that it maintains technological preeminence in the coming decades.

In a random sample of start-ups collected from U.S. Census Bureau data, just 11.6 percent adopted advanced technology; however, these firms accounted for 39 percent of total employment and 44 percent of total revenue in the sample.

The reality is that if the United States doesn’t become more like China, it will lose the battle for advanced technology leadership.

Canada has zero entries among the world’s top 50 science and tech clusters. Waterloo is the best candidate for elevation. To make that happen, the federal and Ontario governments should create an incentive: Tech start-ups based in Waterloo, as well as firms outside Canada that relocate meaningful R&D and innovation production to the region, will pay no tax for a decade.

Only in the United States is gutting a world-leading firm seen as a policy win. No other government would be insane enough to attack its own national champions the way American antitrust enforcers do.

Canada needs a new federal institution that makes its innovation system more than the sum of its parts: a Canadian Innovation and Industrial Transformation Agency. This institution wouldn’t replace programs. It would govern them coherently, strategically, and at speed.

Congress has authorized $20 billion over five years to fund the National Science Foundation’s Technology Innovation Partnership, but lawmakers have appropriated just $410 million. To win the techno-economic war with China, America needs the TIP directorate to be fully funded.

If the Starmer government thinks for one minute that the PRC will allow the UK to expand exports of anything with any real strategic importance, it is gravely mistaken. It’s time for competitive realism.

Rostow’s model suggests that stage five is the ultimate destination. A better model sees no fixed stages and certainly no permanent peak, only a relentless push to go higher and higher.