Canada has long worn a badge of innovation proudly. For decades, we’ve brought healing therapies and new technologies to the world—insulin, avionics, gene editing—and, as seen most recently with the Nobel prize in Economics, novel ways to understand economic and industrial growth.
So it is with some degree of worry that we receive the news that Canada has slipped three spots in the 2025 Global Innovation Index, now ranking 17th worldwide. While we rank 13th in innovation inputs (down from 8th last year), we remain stuck at 20th in outputs, proof that this country continues to struggle at turning research strength into economic growth. For a nation with world-class science, this gap is more than a statistic. It’s a signal of both risk, and opportunity.