Executive Summary
The Balsillie Survey is an annual research survey conducted by the Balsillie School of International Affairs as part of the Technology Governance Initiative.
Securing Canada’s Technology Sovereignty serves as the inaugural survey on Canada’s innovation ecosystem, which comes during a time of significant political and geopolitical transition. By examining the convergence between industry, policy and research, the purpose of this survey is to provide a critical platform for Canada’s top technology stakeholders to offer policy-related feedback, generating essential empirical data and analyses for both the policy and research communities. After receiving 36 complete and reliable responses from Canadian stakeholders, the 2025 survey serves as the inaugural “temperature check” on Canada’s innovation ecosystem during a critical transition toward the federal government’s mandate for “Canadian-made” solutions. Canada currently maintains a profound “innovation paradox” where Canada champions global research excellence, while simultaneously failing to translate success into domestic market leadership.
Demographically, the survey captured a wide breadth of expert perspectives, with over 60% of respondents occupying senior leadership roles (C-suite, board or senior management) and over half possessing more than 15 years of experience within their sectors. The information and communications technology (ICT) sector represented the largest targeted group of responses (44.44%), while “other” (47.2%) maintained the most participants overall. The survey data contains no clear consensus on the accuracy of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s (ISED’s) current sector classifications, with 27.78% of respondents finding them “Not Accurate at All” for reasons including the failure to capture horizontal enablers such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Conversely, 19.44% of respondents found them to be highly accurate, while most people (41.67%) reported slight accuracy in the categorization.
The survey results generally reveal a technology landscape characterized by common frustrations with current federal strategies and classifications, as well as contrasting satisfaction with Canada’s technology governance including substantial investments made in AI and the subsequent bolstering of Canada’s domestic computing power. Notably, a significant majority of stakeholders (61.11%) reported facing major barriers in moving innovations from research to the market, with some citing a risk-averse culture where domestic enterprises hesitate to adopt local start-up solutions. Additionally, only a mere 5.56% of respondents agree with the effectiveness of current federal policy tools, with some responses describing current actions as siloed, risk-averse and overly focused on early-stage research rather than commercial scaling. Furthermore, nearly 30% of participants found Canada’s regulatory framework to be “unclear” or “very unclear,” with some describing it as a hodgepodge of reactive, “feel-good regulations” that add administrative bloat without technical substance.
KEY FINDINGS
- Procurement gap: Many stakeholders identified the federal government’s failure to act as a first-paying anchor customer and the corresponding need for more effective procurement strategies to prevent issues such as “brain drain” to other countries.
- Regulatory fog: Some responses reported that fragmentation across provinces and federal domains create significant uncertainty for building sovereign, auditable systems.
- Importance of trust: An overwhelming 80.56% of participants view public trust as “Very Important” to technological success, determining innovation outcomes.
- Statistical significance: Chi-square tests — statistical analysis revealing the strength of association between survey responses and their demographic information — confirmed that industry stakeholders are statistically more critical of policy tools than those in academia, reflecting a profound disconnect between research inputs and economic outcomes.
- Classification dissonance: Industry sectors like ICT report much higher frustration with outdated government categories than more established sectors such as Ocean Tech.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Governmental priorities
- Creating a central innovation agency or crown corporation, tasked with focusing, tracking, and driving a national research and technology strategy.
- Pursuing stable and cooperative economic partnerships internationally, as part of trade diversification efforts away from the United States.
Industry interests
- Streamlining and prioritizing domestic procurement of Canadian-made goods and technologies.
- Strategically monetizing intellectual property (IP) and scaling nationally critical industries, such as clean energy.
Public concerns
- Fostering greater entrepreneurial innovation and trust in the Canadian economy, through the promotion of fairer, less concentrated markets.
- Greater civil society involvement in the oversight and governance of emerging technologies such as AI.