Bringing It Home: Alberta Doubles Down on Domestic Innovation Policy with ATIS 2.0

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

Alberta has released its second Technology and Innovation Strategy (ATIS 2.0), the first comprehensive update to the province’s initial innovation strategy, released in 2022. It’s playoff season, so I hope you’ll forgive a sports analogy. There’s a well-worn hockey platitude about skating to where the puck is going that applies here. The global economic order has experienced several tectonic shifts over the past decade, and Canadian jurisdictions have largely been slow to adapt from a policy perspective.

ATIS 2.0 outlines a new type of policy direction, and the strategy commits to several initiatives that our team at CCI has been lobbying for for the better part of a decade.

First, the province is standing up an Intellectual Property office tasked with ensuring more big ideas are commercialized and retained in the province. This is the type of big-picture thinking we’ve outlined many times. Jurisdictions with strong IP policy establish more robust global value chains, their firms have greater freedom to operate (i.e., companies don’t need to pay larger corporations to use their own technology because they own the patents, data, and software), and spin off more successful and resilient economic ecosystems.

This is a long-overdue step for the province, and there are parallels between Alberta’s work and that of Ontario, which established Intellectual Property Ontario in 2022. Other provinces should take note.

The province has also introduced legislation to enable for more co-investment opportunities for “knowledge” companies through the Alberta Enterprise Corporation as part of the Strategy. ATIS 2.0 explicitly outlines a commitment to seeing more companies scale in the province. So far, many of the proposed public/private investment policy updates reflect past CCI proposals, and we’ll continue to pursue this line of advocacy to ensure the focus remains on scale-up capital.

From where I sit, the final critical commitment – and the item lightest on details — in the Strategy is around innovation procurement. ATIS 2.0 pledges to “use government procurement as a catalyst for innovation and create programs that connect Alberta businesses to global supply chains.” Procurement — a supply-side economic driver used by nearly every other prosperous economy but mainly ignored in Canada — has been an increasingly imperative focus of CCI’s advocacy over the past several years.

Reforming the ways in which government buys and orienting purchasing processes toward creating and keeping high‑value economic activity locally is difficult, but critical work. I look forward to seeing more details on the province’s plans in this area.

As we always say at CCI, execution is the chariot of genius, and seeing Alberta’s plans on paper (well, PDF) become reality will be fun to watch over the coming months and years. Aside from the IP Office, financial commitments are few and far between within the piece. However, officials have lots of substance to work with in the updated strategy, and I look forward to seeing how that work yields future dividends for Alberta innovators.

Jess Sinclair leads CCI’s advocacy efforts in the prairies, and can be reached at jsinclair@canadianinnovators.org.
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About the Council of Canadian Innovators

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 170 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.