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Dr. Andrew Maxwell has spent three decades studying how people inside institutions actually make innovation decisions, from his early years at ABB through a PhD examining investor judgment to his current role as a professor of technology and entrepreneurship at York University's Lassonde School of Engineering. He's the founder of the BEST program, author of the Innovation Doctor series on Substack, and runs Avatar Innovations, working across academic health centres, federal research funders, and the incubator ecosystem meant to carry ideas from lab to market.
In this conversation, Andrew walks through why culture sits underneath everything else in his five-driver framework — culture, capability, incentives, institutions, and technology — and why so many of Canada's innovation failures get mislabelled as technical problems when they're actually cultural ones: assumptions nobody wants to challenge, and a default tendency to keep doing what we did yesterday. He calls this his "laws of innovation inertia," a direct parallel to Newton's laws — bodies at rest stay at rest unless something forces them to move.
We get into why research funders like NSERC and CIHR were never mandated to produce productivity or adoption outcomes in the first place, only publications and advancing knowledge, and why that mismatch quietly shapes what gets built and what gets shelved. Andrew built TechConnect at York specifically to close that gap, training researchers to ask what a user actually needs rather than just optimizing a technical spec. He also makes the case that the skillset required to discover something and the skillset required to persuade someone to adopt it are fundamentally different, and that most incubators aren't structured to bridge that particular chasm.
The conversation turns to funding itself: Andrew's contrarian take that venture capital's milestone-based, real-options structure is actually more disciplined than government research funding, which hands out money with far less accountability. He introduces the idea of a "farm team," regions and companies that quietly accept talent will outgrow them and leave, and Natalie pushes back with the question underneath it all: is Canada a farm team, or does it not know what it is yet. Andrew is candid that he doesn't have a clean answer, and that may be part of the problem.
This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility.
If this shifted how you think about Canada's innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it.
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