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The innovation-policy shops at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto launched a new project on Tuesday to track the performance of Canada’s innovation economy, focusing on equity, diversity and inclusion. Here’s what you need to know.

What it is: The Inclusive Innovation Monitor collates more than 30 indicators and metrics such as post-secondary education levels, venture capital investment and growth, government R&D spending, patent applications, and participation in technology occupations. Ryerson University-based Brookfield Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy compiled it.

Why now: Governments across the country have increasingly framed business policy in terms of innovation in recent years. But lawmakers and researchers are “less aware of … how benefits and risks of innovation or the economy more broadly are distributed,” said Daniel Munro, a fellow at both Brookfield and the Innovation Policy Lab. The monitor is designed as a tool for such policymakers and researchers.

Notable numbers: Canadian firms are more likely to conduct innovation activities than the OECD average (66 per cent vs. 40 per cent), but the country lags other advanced economies in both business spending on R&D and patents (0.8 per cent of GDP vs. 1.7 per cent and 62.3 patents per million people vs. 132.6, respectively). The amount of venture capital investment in Canada as a percentage of GDP (0.18 per cent) is greater than most OECD nations except the U.S. (0.55 per cent) and Israel (0.38 per cent), and is growing faster than most of the G7. Black workers earned $13,420 less on average than white ones as of 2016, while Indigenous Peoples earned $10,349 less than non-Indigenous peers.

One major finding: For non-Black or non-Indigenous racialized people, “education [and] participation in technology-intensive occupations is higher [than average], but wages for those people are lower in those occupations than for white Canadians—and they feel less empowered to actually offer opinions about how to shape innovation,” said Munro. That suggests conventional approaches like encouraging education or access to traditionally high-paying jobs might not be effective because racialized people face barriers in those roles. Or, in other words: systemic racism.

The information gap: In an accompanying report, the two institutes call for more demographic breakdowns—such as Indigenous identity, race, sex, immigration history and sexuality—in R&D and VC funding data, as well as more regularly gauging job-market involvement for people with disabilities. Statistics Canada began collecting race-based data in the Labour Force Survey—the most widely reported national indicator of employment—in July 2020. “What you don’t get are breakdowns for a number of the more conventional innovation indicators,” said Munro, adding that data on people with disabilities is “abysmal.” The monitor relies on the Canadian Survey on Disability, and its most recent edition is from 2017.