ABOUT THIS EPISODE
David Carter has spent 13 years as CEO of Innovation Factory, Hamilton's regional innovation centre, helping founders in tech, digital health, and advanced manufacturing bring their ideas to market. Before that, he built and scaled his own software company and worked as a CTO, experience that still shapes how he thinks about product growth and what it actually takes to scale. He's also a co-founder of the Synapse Life Science Consortium, linking Hamilton's life sciences ecosystem across McMaster, Hamilton Health Sciences, and St. Joseph's Healthcare, and sits on boards spanning digital health and national innovation networks.In this conversation, David walks through the tangle of institutions a Canadian founder has to navigate between lab bench and fundable company, and why that tangle matters less than people assume. There's real overlap between industry liaison offices like McMaster's Milo, campus-led accelerators like the Forge, and regional innovation centres like his own, but David makes the case that it's survivable: "there's no wrong door," and founders get routed to the right resource no matter where they walk in first.We get into how research gets stuck, not because Canadian researchers lack fundable ideas, but because many simply don't know what to do with them or where to take them, leaving genuinely brilliant work shelved once a PhD wraps and the researcher moves on. David explains the handoff chain from university tech-transfer offices to campus incubators to regional innovation centres, and why nobody at any stage is trying to "hog the glory" from the startups themselves.David also raises a question Canada still can't answer: once public money goes into a company, does anyone track what happened to it? He makes the case for real accountability tied to non-dilutive funding, not to punish failure, but to actually learn from it, and admits candidly that even he doesn't know whether early government support was the thing that got a company like Shopify through a bad day, or just something everyone piles credit onto after the fact. He's optimistic all the same: a new generation of founders who grew up with the internet, paired with the disruptive force of AI, feels to him like another point of inflection, the kind he last saw in the mid-90s.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.🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada's innovation journey.🔗 Questions, feedback, or want to connect? https://augmentios.com/contact📩 Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/BIPLinkedInNewsletter#BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #InnovationEcosystem #Hamilton #McMasterUniversity #StartupCanada #TechTransfer
