New York City, New York, Wednesday, May 29, 2013

I’m delighted to join you to talk about innovation.

A most fascinating book that I read this past year is The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner. It tells the incredible story of Bell Labs. Located not too far from where we’re standing now—just a drive across the Hudson River and into New Jersey—this organization for many years was a great incubator of innovation. It spawned some of the twentieth century’s most influential advances in communications technology—the transistor, integrated circuit, cellular telephone and satellite. Our shrinking, integrated world is in a very real way the product of the deep thinking and hard work that went on there.

I learned from Gertner’s book that Jack Morton was a brilliant, hard-charging engineer who played a key role in the organization’s large development department. One of his more famous and daunting tasks was taking the transistor from laboratory to market.

You see, coming up with the idea for something such as the transistor—ingenious as it is—was just the first step. The people at Bell Labs had to build a working prototype. Then they had to refine its design to make it perfectly functional and absolutely reliable. Then they had to make sure it could be reproduced consistently, cheaply and in massive quantities so that consumers of all types could be in a position to buy and use it.

One of Morton’s colleagues summed up the challenge succinctly: Making a few transistors in the laboratory wasn’t difficult. But learning how to make them by the hundreds or even hundreds of thousands and of sufficient uniformity to be interchangeable and reliable, now that was difficult.

As a result of his developmental work on the transistor, Morton quickly came to see innovation not as one simple action, but as a total process of interrelated functions. Morton wrote that innovation is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of new products or manufacturing techniques, nor the creation of new markets. Rather, it’s the integration of all these things to achieve a common industrial goal.

He would later add a corollary to his insight. He maintained that innovation had not occurred unless you manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities and then marketed and sold the thing in equally large numbers.

I tell this story to help clarify what innovation truly is.

At the core of innovation lies not just the value of pure science, but also a fundamental economic imperative. True innovation isn’t merely discovering and understanding. It must also trigger refinement, improvement and mass manufacturing, and culminate in widespread use.

I tell this story also to help us comprehend that innovation is not one person’s eureka moment frozen in time. And so, just as the leaders at Bell Labs knew that innovation was driven by teams of specialists from a variety of fields,  I think we must grasp the fact that creating a deep culture of innovation in our countries is a responsibility shared by many—by our governments at all levels; by our philanthropic foundations and volunteer organizations; by our schools, from neighbourhood primary schools to vast post-graduate research centres; and by our private sectors, from the smallest businesses to big industry associations to the largest multinational corporations.

And, of course, the true spirit of innovation has brought me to New York City this week and it brings us all together today. It’s right that we gather here.

The Center for Urban Science and Progress is a hothouse of innovation. You bring together under one roof people, information and technologies from many disciplines.

At the same time, you reach out across organizational and geographic borders to partner with like-minded groups to share the insights you uncover. In so doing, you test, refine and strengthen those insights so they can be used by people around the world to make their cities more productive, liveable, equitable, and resilient.

Your willingness and ability to work across disciplines and borders to uncover, share and refine intelligence is something I call the diplomacy of knowledge. The practice of the diplomacy of knowledge is a powerful force in innovation. Students of history appreciate that civilization’s greatest advances often came not wholly from within certain disciplines but at the intersections of different disciplines.

While such interactions can be conducted locally, regionally and nationally, they are most potent when we cross international borders to cultivate relationships among researchers, scientists, students, investors and entrepreneurs from many countries.

You may have read the book Why Nations Fail, by James Robinson, the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard, and Daron Acemoglu, the Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. The thesis of their insightful book is that societies that are politically and economically inclusive thrive, while exclusive nations and societies fail.

The fact that the two co-authors tackle the important question of “Why Nations Fail?” from different disciplinary angles is part of what makes their argument so compelling. Both their method and their conclusion reinforce the same argument: when we work together, inclusively, and approach something from many different angles, we gain a much better sense of its true nature.

Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant metaphor of a burning candle is still, I think, the best way to illustrate the concept of the diplomacy of knowledge and its incredible power. The candle aflame symbolizes not only enlightenment, but also the transmission of learning from one person or group of people to another.

When you light your candle from the flame of mine, my light is not diminished. Just the opposite. The light from both our candles shines brighter on all around us.

Physicists call this light candlepower. The Center for Urban Science and Progress is doing its part to increase the world’s candlepower. I think I can say without arrogance that Canadians frequently make excellent partners when it comes to increasing candlepower. We have three key qualities in our favour.

First, we believe deeply in the intrinsic value of learning from one another and sharing knowledge widely. We came by this belief early and of necessity; the very survival of the first European settlers to Canada was wholly dependent on their willingness to learn from the local Aboriginal populations.

Second, we’ve made quality education freely or affordably accessible to all. By doing so, generations of Canadians have been able to overcome barriers that exist in all countries—racism, poverty, class immobility—and achieve their true potential as individuals.

And third, we encourage new Canadians to retain and celebrate those aspects of their heritages that don’t conflict with the time-honoured values that have made our country such a success. This balanced approach enriches our country by incorporating the best that others bring.

Canada’s universities best express my country’s penchant for innovation and our desire to partner. I’m so delighted that my old institution, the University of Toronto, has forged close ties with the Center for Urban Science and Progress.

This partnership enables students, teachers and researchers from these two institutions to practice the diplomacy of knowledge. At the same time, this alliance serves as both an example and a gateway for Canadians and Americans to form other ties with schools, businesses and organizations in our respective countries.

Canada’s productivity, competitiveness, economic growth and lasting prosperity are driven in large measure by academic and scientific research and development and by speeding innovations from laboratories and schools to people, households, workplaces and cities across our country and around the world.

As a consequence of that understanding, steps are taken to enhance our country’s ability to practise the diplomacy of knowledge.

Investments are increased in early-stage risk capital to get increasingly more businesses off the ground and running.

Large-scale venture capital funds were launched so that enterprises engaged in costly science-based research and development can access the money they need to grow.

Over 43 networks and centres of excellence were created to mobilize my country’s best research, development and entrepreneurial talent to uncover insights into a range of pressing global challenges.

And incubator and accelerator organizations were expanded to ensure technology-based SMEs can connect with key high-tech players in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York City.

I am delighted that we are joined here today by several Canadian companies participating in the CTA Digital Media. Today is, in fact, the first day of their three-month acceleration program in New York City.

To date, 11 out of 30 Canadian companies have opened business development in New York City. We think the clean tech accelerator will be of particular interest to CUSP, as it connects Canadian clean transportation, smart grid, and green chemistry technology with New York City market.

Countries that do innovation best—such as Finland and Germany—all have such collaborative entities in place. Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute is a perfect example. While supported by the German government, the institute gets roughly 70 percent of its funding from outside contracts.

Your country also recognizes the importance of public-sector scientific institutes working with firms and industries to generate real returns for people. In his 2014 budget, President Obama is pushing for more near-term results from federally funded research.

Starting in 1996, research investments increased drastically. In fact, for Canada, there were 11 years where investments increased by 11 percent per year, and those investments have continued to grow.

A 2011 study conducted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, DC, praised my country’s performance. It noted that government-funded university research accounted for 0.39 percent of GDP compared to 0.24 percent in the United States.

I mention these figures to compare Canada’s performance with that of a world leader in innovation, not as an expression of competition between our two countries.

We must never be competitors in innovation.

We must always be partners. And as innovation leaders, all of us here have the responsibility to work together across disciplines, organizations, boundaries and borders to spur research and development, and speed innovations from laboratories to people.

We can fulfil that obligation by taking full advantage of the opportunities that are now open to us. Unprecedented possibilities await American scientists, researchers, teachers, students, entrepreneurs and business executives to invest, conduct research and build partnerships with Canadians so that together we can bring about and use innovations to overcome the challenges we share.

And so, I urge all of you innovation leaders here today to work with Canadians as allies in innovation and take advantage of these opportunities.

Working closely together has always been the secret of success on our shared continent. Speaking before a joint session of Canada’s parliament more than 50 years ago, President Kennedy described impeccably the enduring ties that bind our two countries.

He said, “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.”

Back in 1961, when President Kennedy uttered those evocative words, we defined necessity primarily as our shared need to safeguard ourselves, our friends and our way of life at the height of the Cold War. Today, our definition of necessity is different but no less daunting.

We must rejuvenate our physical infrastructure—especially the roads, bridges, sewers and electrical grids in our cities—after decades of neglect.

We must regenerate our urban industrial communities and make them—as they once were for generations of workers and their families—the source of meaningful jobs and high standards of living.

We must rethink how we transport growing urban populations in light of rising costs, aging infrastructure and environmental pressures.

We must delve deeply into how we can power our cities in ways that lower consumption and reduce harmful emissions.

Perhaps most importantly, we must ask the right questions so that we can come up with the best answers to make our cities economically prosperous, culturally vibrant and socially cohesive and harmonious.

Our world is increasingly an urban one. The world’s problems are urban problems. Our solutions to those problems must be multidisciplinary and international in nature to reflect the diversity and complexity of urban life.

So together—Americans and Canadians—let us step up our efforts.

Let us work together to gather, integrate and analyze data to understand urban life.

Let us share, test and refine our knowledge to make innovative breakthroughs.

Let us use those innovations to solve our most profound problems.

Let us be knowledge diplomats, ambassadors of innovation and create the smart and caring cities, countries and world of which we all dream.

Thank you.