RSA Ambassador to Canada:
Dr. Geoff Gregson is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta and Senior Consultant in Research and Innovation with Alberta Health Services. He has an extensive background in the study of regional and national policies/programs related to R&D, scientific and business-university collaboration, enterprise support mechanisms and risk capital investment and is a research fellow with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Women’s Economic Imperative (WEI-Forward) and the Centre for Innovation Studies (THECIS). Geoff holds a PhD in Management, LLM in Intellectual Property Law and MSc in Social Research from the University of Edinburgh (UK) and MBA from the University of Calgary (Canada).
Message from the Ambassador:
““I am committed to extending RSA activities in Canada and building new partnerships with RSA members across the country and with colleagues from other countries. Please feel free to contact me to discuss regional studies in Canada or to share your thoughts on opportunities for collaboration and project ideas.”
You may be interested in:
Geoff Gregson’s blog post “
Geoff’s blog post presents findings on a study of policy effects on capital flows in Canada, where a policy-rich environment has developed to support different government priorities and a diverse set of local economic conditions and community capacities. While the federal government plays a prominent role in funding the transformation of research and scientific knowledge and supporting new enterprises, Canada has a poor record of transforming science for market applications or building innovative enterprises to scale. A contributing factor for the former is the weak alignment of institutional incentives linking ‘upstream’ private sector-led research with ‘downstream’ priority-driven research. The scale-up challenge is more complex; the combination of a small, fragmented local market, shortages of experienced business talent, lack of ‘at-scale’ sources of growth capital and aversion to risk by some of Canada’s large, established firms.
Click here to read the full post.