I recently spoke at the McMaster Intellectual Capital Conference. This conference is annually organized by Dr. Nick Bontis and Dr. Chis Bart, with tremendous leadership support by commerce and MBA students (one of the largest student led conferences in the world). Each year I speak at this conference and this year I left with some strong reflections on Canada’s national productivity challenges.
Canada currently has the lowest productivity of the G7, the lowest R&D Investment of the G7, with the exception of Italy. Today, we have fewer per capita researchers, and engineers, fewer per capita inventions and innovation and fewer per capita investment in Information Technology. We are also slower to bring new products to market.
These are all real and fundamental challenges to Canada’s economy.
The major challenges are (1) The Productivity Gap and the need to compete more efficiently and effectively, and (2) the People Gap as we need to attract and retain the best and the brightest and continuously learn new skills.
Canada trails the US in terms of productivity and the gap is widening. One of the major reasons is due to the lack of sustained investments in IT. Specifically, we need to accelerate our investment in creating, distributing and maximizing intellectual assets or knowledge assets. Yet when I ask CEOs, COO, CMOs, CFOs CIOs- they seldom can articulate a clear strategy on how they are effectively managing their knowledge assets. With over 80% of the capital markets tied up in knowledge generating assets (service companies, knowledge workers), etc. we have a fundamental opportunity to address to improve our competitive advantage.
Dr. Nick Bontis and I with many of our global partners, associates, or peers have been involved in helping to define, shape, and further support global organization’s ability to develop intellectual capital or Knowledge Management strategies. As much progress as we try to make in Canada in this area - there remains much more to accomplish.
Depending on the organization we partner with -they always take on a unique problem to solve. Problem sets can vary from creating a risk management strategy around knowledge assets, to helping clients select relevant technology platforms to collaborate and share and harvest knowledge more effectively - managing knowledge flows in creating customized New Product or Service Development solutions.
When we partnered with one of the top Canadian banks, it was to help them develop a use case to migrate from one portal environment to a longer term portal strategy. Other clients are seeking specialized functionality to support their portal requirements. For example, we recently visited a major Canadian hospital to discuss their eLearning requirements for a robust Learning Management Solution like MedWorxx that squarely focuses on a hospital’s unique learning requirements.
Whatever the productivity challenges are… one important opportunity to take advantage of is for organizations to leverage social media and collaborative solutions. Although Canada prides itself in being leaders in internet adoption and usage, our innovation in winning internet business models that globally dominate pales compared to our USA neighbor.
To take up the productivity challenge, Canadians and all nations need to use social network solutions like: Blogs, Wikis (like Atlassian) collaborative and intelligent workflow solutions (like Sharepoint), or community of practise solutions like Shared Insights, or web-collaboration solutions (like WebEx), etc - Each of these solutions are examples of how countries can help close their productivity gap challenges.
With knowledge flows coming from community ecosystems - our dependency on tapping into these new forms of collaborative interaction tools will be critical for competitive advantage.
In some respects, it is either Collaborate or Die!
The ability to leap frog has never been greater as rising powers continue to increase their muscle - new Tsunami waves are in the making - and I would prefer to see Canada reverse the tide sooner than later. The year over year productivity erosion should have all Canadian leaders seeking new ways of increasing their producitivty capabilities. The secret weapons will be found in using effectively collaborative business models, and collaborative toolkits , and leadership practices (such as storytelling) where knowledge can be effectively created and leveraged.
My next Blog will feature Innovation and Leadership using StoryTelling for Competitive Advantage.