What Does Buying Good Ideas Mean in an Alberta Context?

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

In December 2023, my colleague Laurent Carbonneau, CCI’s Director of Policy and Research, half-joked that 2024 would be our “Year of Procurement.” At the time, I didn’t know what to make of that assertion — I wasn’t convinced procurement was a singularly compelling subject.

Let me tell you, Laurent has converted me. In the first half of 2024, much has been made of Canada’s productivity emergency, and the capital gains tax introduced through the federal budget has shone a spotlight on the need to rethink the way we do business as a nation.

Part of this soul-searching involves governments re-evaluating how they buy and whether Canadians are getting quality services and good value for our tax dollars. Enter CCI’s report, Buying Ideas: Procuring Public Sector Innovation in Canada, which outlines a number of measures to avoid future boondoggles (ArriveCan, anyone?) and deliver economic growth for Canada.

The CCI team isn’t alone in thinking about ways to solve big policy challenges, deliver better services for residents, and support more Canadian tech SMEs. Back in March, Alberta Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish announced his department would be beginning work on a digital marketplace.

Since that time, our team has been communicating with department officials on the need to consider the following:

1. A provincial procurement concierge service focussed on innovation.

2. Re-tooling RFPs so local scale-ups aren’t inadvertently left out of the bidding process.

3. Creating measurable tech SME targets within government.

4. Better reverse-engineering innovative approaches to the provision of government services to arrive at better solutions sooner for Albertans and cut red tape for innovators.

The recent launch of the Alberta Digital Services Platform represents a step forward in this work, and we look forward to subsequent announcements over the back half of 2024. Big culture shifts in government operations don’t happen overnight, but the above ideas will help Alberta catchup with other world-leading jurisdictions in transparent procurement policy. More to the point, when governments validate and encourage the commercialization of Canadian technology, that knock-on effect improves conditions for the broader innovation ecosystem.

To learn more about CCI's work in Alberta, get in touch with Jess Sinclair 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 150 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 healthtech, 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.