香蕉视频

It's not news that Canadian companies aren't very innovative. The Conference Board of Canada, which does a big report card on the Canadian economy each year, had to give this country a D on innovation.

That's a key reason that our companies have done a worrisomely poor job of boosting productivity over the years, raising serious questions about our future standard of living.

Canada's productivity has been growing much more slowly than that of the United States for more than 20 years - just a little better than half the U.S. pace since 1989.

Productivity, which measures how much value a worker can produce in an hour, is not a gauge of how hard people work. It's more an indication of how good their equipment is and how wellmanaged their company is.

Without innovation - the ability to come up with new, improved products and services - productivity suffers.

But there's a glimmer of good news, too: improving our innovativeness and productivity could be easier than many believe. Although many tend to think of innovation in terms of breakthroughs such as the BlackBerry smartphone, a Canadian invention that revolutionized mobile communications, that's far from the only way forward.

And a good thing, too, since Canada has very few big high-tech companies that can produce a stream of such big breakthroughs.

But there's plenty of room for all companies to boost this country's performance through what Jean-Ren茅 Halde calls "incremental innovation."

Halde, chief executive officer of the Business Development Bank of Canada, a federal agency that provides venture capital and other financing to small businesses, has been preoccupied by this issue recently.

Speaking yesterday at a 香蕉视频 conference on corporate productivity and innovation, he said that although big, radical innovations are important, we too often forget that little, incremental innovations can make a big difference in how well a business succeeds.

Read full article: , February 24, 2011