Innovation comes from Quebec; the value should too

Quebec is brimming with ideas, researchers, and promising startups, but struggles to transform its innovations into large-scale companies and strategically important intellectual assets under local control. This observation is part of a broader economic assessment: the Bank of Canada highlights the lack of productivity growth in the country, while Statistics Canada points to a paradox in which technological capabilities do not sufficiently translate into productivity gains or commercialization.

Although Quebec has demonstrated its ability to foster world-class technology companies, many of these successes result in foreign acquisitions accompanied by a transfer of intellectual property, thereby limiting the collective capacity to sustainably capture the value created. Conversely, many major economies treat their patents as strategic assets that underpin their technological sovereignty—an approach echoed in a recent manifesto signed by European technology leaders such as Airbus, ASML, and Siemens. Quebec’s main challenge, therefore, lies less in the startup phase than in scaling up, due to a lack of patient capital and more strategic management of intellectual property.

Read the article in Les Affaires (in French)