Thanks for having me here today to speak with you.
I'm going to share with you some of the the Smart Prosperity Institute's findings on clean innovation in Canada. We've spent about two and a half years looking at this issue specifically. We held a conference in Calgary with academia, business, and various stakeholders. We've done our literature survey and our grey literature survey, and a series of targeted and structured interviews with experts in this space, largely from Canada but also outside of Canada, from various parts of the “clean innovation ecosystem”, as we call it.
We will be releasing the first report that includes our findings later this spring. I'd be happy to share it with you in early April, but in the interim I'm going to give you highlights of some of the things we're finding in our work.
I should remind you that Smart Prosperity Institute, in case you're not familiar with us, is a think tank here at the University of Ottawa. We are research based and evidence based. We look to see what we can find from the evidence out there and we draw conclusions from that.
What we've found in clean innovation is this. Increasingly, the world is looking for clean innovation. There is a market demand for these things. Economic rewards will flow to those nations and firms that embrace the new thinking necessary for improving our economic strength and simultaneously protecting our environment. These clean innovation opportunities permeate the entire economy. They're not just in one sector or some sectors. They're giving rise to new industries and at the same time rewarding traditional industries, such as the natural resource sectors, for making existing products more efficiently in a lower-carbon way. Also, they're creating altogether new products from this.
The world is rapidly moving this way, so Canada can't afford to fall behind. If we do, we will lose the opportunity to have market share in export markets. This is true both in terms of meeting our national environmental objectives and the objectives we've set in international agreements and in terms of seizing this as an economic opportunity. We think you can position Canada and the “made in Canada” brand as one that really could have economic credibility and could seize some economic market share in export markets by developing our products, whether they're goods, services, or commodities, in the most resource-efficient and low-carbon way possible. They will be rewarded for that.
Generally, there is the thought that countries innovate best around what they already do well, and—