Research
Evaluating Government Programs That Support Business Innovation: Framework and Principles
This report clarifies the meaning and importance of business innovation according to the latest developments in how industry, governments, and academia need to approach it.
Welcome to Canada: Foreign Direct Investment and Innovation
This report clarifies the meaning and importance of business innovation according to the latest developments in how industry, governments, and academia need to approach it.
Strengthening Symbiosis: International Business and Innovation
This report analyzes the relationship between business innovation and international business in Canada.
The Status of Collaboration and the Role of Innovation: Supporting Networks in Canadian Industry
This report addresses the issues affecting how Canadian companies collaborate for more success in innovation and how they take advantage of innovation-supporting networks.
Bridging the Valley: Linking Public Investments in Research to Business Innovation
This report seeks to understand why Canada’s significant investments in R&D do not translate into better business innovation performance.
Developing and Leveraging Innovation Talent Within Firms: Strategies to Improve Innovation Performance
This report identifies and analyzes effective strategies, tools, and approaches that firms can use to develop and leverage their innovation talent.
Innovation Measurement Metrics and Practices: The Manufacturing Sector
Part of a series looking at the innovation measurement metrics and practices in Canadian firms, this report focuses on the innovation goals, challenges, and best practices in the manufacturing sectors.
Innovation Measurement Metrics and Practices: The Life Sciences and Clean Tech Sectors
This CBI report examines innovation measurement metrics and practices in the Life Sciences and Clean Tech sectors. Its findings draw from relevant literature, a Conference Board survey, and telephone interviews with sector executives.
The Stars Come Out: Innovation Management in Start-Up Businesses
This CBI report (second in a series) focuses on the management of start-up companies and is largely based on interviews with the leaders of 17 young, rapidly growing Canadian companies.
Approaches to Innovation Management: Innovation and Canadian Business Survey, 2014
This briefing focuses on innovation management. Topics discussed include the most important factors in determining Canada's commercial innovation performance, the relationship between management and innovation performance, and the barriers to innovation.
Developing and Leveraging Innovation Talent Within Firms: Strategies to Improve Innovation Performance
This report identifies and analyzes effective strategies, tools, and approaches that firms can use to develop and leverage their innovation talent.
Innovation and Canadian Business Survey, 2014: What’s Risk Got to Do With It?
This briefing, the first in a series, discusses risk and innovation. It’s based on the results of a 2014 survey conducted to ascertain Canadian business attitudes and behaviours on innovation.
Improving Innovation Management Decision-Making: Thinking Like an Innovator
This report examines the ways of thinking, questioning, and behaving that constitute managers’ decision-making patterns about innovation. It highlights decision-making techniques that firms could use to improve how they manage innovation processes.
Start Me Up: Funding Canada’s Emerging Innovators
This report considers the strengths and weaknesses in Canada’s financial system related to funding innovative start-ups. It concludes by making suggestions for improving early-stage innovation finance.
Metrics for Firm-Level Business Innovation in Canada
This report shows the value of measurement-based management of firm-level innovation by analyzing metrics usage in Canadian industry. It provides framework-based methodologies for using balanced metric portfolios that help enhance corporate performance.
The Private Equity Experience of Canadian Business
Innovative organizational culture needs to be directly managed if Canadian companies want to improve their innovation performance. Find out how in this report, which provides a framework and suggests effective managerial approaches.
Culture and Innovation: The Secret Sauce
Innovative organizational culture needs to be directly managed if Canadian companies want to improve their innovation performance. Find out how in this report, which provides a framework and suggests effective managerial approaches.
2012 Survey Findings: The State of Firm-Level Innovation in Canada
By analyzing the current state of Canadian firm-level business innovation, this report provides a better understanding of the business strategies, innovations, and challenges for identifying ways to enhance Canadian innovation performance.
General Innovation Skills Aptitude Test
The General Innovation Skills Aptitude Test 2.0 (GISAT2.0) raises awareness and understanding around the skills, attitudes, and behaviours individuals and organizations need to be innovative—as listed in The Conference Board’s Innovation Skills Profile (ISP2.0).
By identifying and then assessing the innovation skills found in individuals and required by organizations GISAT 2.0 is a powerful tool that assists workplaces and individuals to better match their innovation skills capacities with their innovation needs. In particular, the GISAT 2.0 helps individuals, teams, and workplaces identify, understand and assess three essential innovation skills measurements:
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The extent to which an individual demonstrates a desired innovation skill.
- The importance of an innovation skill to a particular job or job function (and what it means to an organization or an individual).
- The innovation skills gaps that exist between individuals and their job functions (what it means to an organization or an individual and what can be done to resolve these gaps).
Financing Innovation by Established Businesses in Canada
This report analyzes business innovation finance in Canada. It provides a conceptual overview of the innovation finance challenge, then proposes ways to address that challenge that reflect the perspectives of innovative companies and financiers. The report focuses, in particular, on the special characteristics of Canadian capital markets that determine their suitability for funding innovation. We conclude with some suggestions for improving Canada’s innovation finance system.
Innovation Management for Established Businesses: Management Matters
This report outlines key innovation management principles for established businesses that wish to innovate to improve their competitive position. It illustrates them using findings from interviews with 16 leading innovative companies.