Publications

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.

Congress’ decision to reject a federal moratorium on state-level AI regulation is a missed opportunity. Without a pause, the United States continues to face a patchwork of state laws that confuses consumers, burdens businesses, and slows innovation.

The recent trial in FTC v. Meta shows the important role that economic experiments can play in establishing a relevant market in antitrust cases. The evidence provided by Meta’s expert economists significantly hampers the FTC’s definition of the relevant market and thus its overall case.

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.

In its push for digital sovereignty, the European Commission is reportedly planning to replace Microsoft Azure with the French cloud provider OVHcloud or another European alternative. But this move, while politically symbolic, would be costly. Far from enhancing security, this migration would sacrifice sound procurement and EU legal obligations in service of a hollow vision of digital nationalism.

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.

Policymakers must justify why they should be allowed to tax the major digital companies differently from the leading firms in other industries. This challenge explains why so much of the DST debate has centered around obscure and abstract notions of a company’s “physical presence” and whether the company’s users “create value.”

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.