'Virtuous Cycle’: Overcoming the Challenges of Innovation Adoption in Canada

For the Life Sciences sector to achieve its goals of economic growth, population health, and health security for all Canadians, innovation adoption rightly needs to be prioritized and sit alongside the first two pillars of the Virtuous Cycle discussed in my last post. While the first two elements of the cycle – Innovative Ecosystem and Innovative Manufacturing – are essential to any Life Sciences strategy and feature prominently in most, Innovation Adoption is the crucial third pillar, and the focus of this article.

The Ontario government’s commitment in Phase 2 of its Life Sciences Strategy is a good recent example that now empowers even the third pillar of the Virtuous Cycle with emphasis on a Health Innovation Pathway, designed to “simplify access for health care organizations to adopt transformative technologies” in Ontario.

This post will look at the strong rationale for contemplating Innovation Adoption within the country’s various Life Sciences strategies, all centred around three opportunities for collective success.

Opportunity #1: Innovating at the Leading Edge

In Canada, we have a highly educated workforce, robust public-private partnerships, and an evolving regulatory framework. But the pressure on our healthcare system will only be alleviated if we can scale pilot innovations and design with patients and caregivers in mind to support sustainable economic outcomes.

For Canada's Life Sciences sector to thrive, innovators and researchers must be afforded the opportunity to apply their world-leading ingenuity at the leading edge of science and technology. It’s not quite enough to build out and support the early-stage innovation ecosystem noted previously via increased wet lab space or incubator sites, for example. Innovators need a domestic real-world environment that is already leveraging and learning about the benefits of latest-generation technology and therapy, enabling them to research and develop on the leading edge.?

At the recent MedTech Conference, a global collection of the medical technology industry, government, payers and providers, I was exposed to stark examples of this need. Canada has already built a robust research and manufacturing sector in surgical, interventional and diagnostic robotics – there were many innovators on display at the Conference! Hubs in Montreal and southern Ontario are global leaders in the field. Despite this home-grown talent, the adoption of robotics in Canada relative to other parts of the world has been limited, at best. We should fairly debate things like cost effectiveness and patient benefit with such innovation, and that’s precisely the point. If we don’t create a culture of adoption, testing and learning – these very companies working at the leading edge will not have an environment to innovate within, taking their expertise and investment to other markets that provide a more advanced sandbox to experiment in and create the next great advance. The same principle holds true in other areas of strong capability in Canada – therapies such as CAR-T or gene therapy. If we are practicing medicine with therapies 1-2 generations old – our clinician researchers will be frustrated working not at the frontier, but at a clinical benchmark not contemporary with global peers.?

An ecosystem approach will help propel us into new frontiers of discovery, but this requires moving away from a risk-averse culture, as it conflicts with the inquisitive and experimental nature of innovation.

Opportunity #2: Navigating the “Valley of Death”

Nowhere is this philosophy more alive than among small start-ups in Canada, where founders and CEOs still face the "Valley of Death," struggling to bridge the gap between innovation and commercialization. This is why we see many of these start-ups raise and use their next series of capital to scale and commercialize their homegrown IP abroad. Canadians continually perform poorly at later stages of the innovation process, from scaling to widespread adoption and use of innovations in the sector more practically. This must change. In addition, those STEM graduates who leave Canada predominantly go south of the border where they can make, on average, between 20 and 30 per cent more money than they would in Canada.

Ontario, as one example, has acknowledged these barriers, and I am optimistic about the impact of initiatives like the Life Sciences Innovation Program (LSIP) to boost commercialization capacity of Ontario companies and start-ups. This program takes a more targeted approach to foster the development of Ontario-made technologies. The program supports early-stage Life Sciences companies in future procurement opportunities and, more importantly, focuses on addressing adoption barriers to advance pilot projects and see solutions in action in hospitals and the health care system. ?

As a signal of alignment with this opportunity, many of the provinces have turned toward innovation pathways of various designs to help counter this very real challenge for home-grown innovators. Now is the time for government, procurement bodies and the Life Sciences sector to work together to operationalize these pathways in an effort to begin to unleash the positive cycle of adoption begetting more innovation – and Canadians accruing the benefits in both health and economic terms.

Opportunity #3: Building Resilient Supply Chains

The final opportunity boils down to security. Creating an environment in Canada that values the adoption of innovation will give us more presence in a globally competitive supply chain – something often referred to as strategic tradables. We saw this come into focus during the pandemic where extreme constraints on supply chains led to significant product availability concerns across virtually every industry. This held true in the life sciences, with critical technologies and medicines under such constraint that Health Canada was compelled to monitor and publish updates on the matter in real time to assist the procurers of these products across Canada. In a period of finite supply and exceeding demand, the harsh reality in our global economy is that quantitative criteria are used to allocate products. Things like size of market and market access favourability often guided various industries’ approach to distribution. Improving our market access and procurement environment helps put Canada on stronger footing from a supply chain resiliency (a.k.a. security) perspective, while also enhancing chances of technology transfer into the country in the long term.?

Tackling this opportunity will require strong partnership already underway with various procurement bodies across Canada. Approaches acknowledging differential innovation versus commoditizing the sector and providing much needed allowance to navigate inflationary pressures are solid examples. In the future, all parties will need to solidify this mindset and continue to assess and trial frameworks such as Value-based Procurement to ensure all stakeholders – Government, Providers, Patients and Industry – are accruing value from the adoption of innovation.

The Interplay of Health, Wealth, and Security

Recent years have demonstrated to us all that the health, economic, and security needs of Canadians are intrinsically linked. So, a successful Life Sciences sector needs to serve each one and all three together with equal focus on the Virtuous Cycle: nurturing of an Innovative Ecosystem, development of plans to reshore Innovative Manufacturing in areas of strategic fit, and Innovation Adoption to fuel further ingenuity, support home-grown start-ups and underpin the security of our globally-reliant healthcare supply chain. This approach would improve our healthcare system by giving Canadians the benefit of life-changing treatments and technologies and, in many cases, offering means to improve efficiency and patient and provider experience as we strive to build a more resilient health system for the future. ?