Good afternoon. Thank you for having me today.
My name is Krista Jones, and I'm the chief delivery officer for MaRS Discovery District. MaRS is a large-scale commercialization engine that has supported 4,000 Canadian entrepreneurs and their deep IP-based SMEs over the last 20 years in key growth sectors.
We are focused on the critical underserved middle stage of the economic growth cycle, where the commercialization of IP and translational research grows into category-leading companies that increase productivity and boost GDP. I want to say a big thank you to all of you for supporting this work through the scale-up platform that's partially funded by FedDev Ontario.
A recent independent study of the economic impact from MaRS-supported SMEs showed that over the past 12 years, they contributed $29.6 billion to GDP, with an annualized growth rate of 20.7%. This group is growing at more than 10 times the rate of Ontario's compound annual GDP growth. This growth rate is what will fuel Canada's future prosperity and our productivity and anchor Canadian leadership in critical advanced industries. It's what will enable Canada to build major knowledge-based economies around our existing strength in creating global-leading IP.
Nearly half of the world's largest corporations today are in the technology and health care sectors, and they are collectively worth over $9.5 trillion. This is more than double that of their peers in the energy, materials and financial services sectors combined.
Many other speakers have highlighted that the business enterprise R and D expenditure is one of the leading indicators for economic growth and that Canada has lagged its international peers and the OECD average for the last 20 years, by 37.5% in 2021 alone. In Canada, our top R and D spenders represent 61% of total Canadian spend and are focused in the technology, health care and industrial advanced industries, but they are only 21% of our 100 largest companies, and none are in the top 250 global patent holders.
The pullback of the industrial sector's R and D in Canada has left only one Canadian company, BlackBerry, on the list of the top 250 patent holders globally, in the 117th position. To truly compete at the global level, we need more Canadian firms that are category leaders and can compete internationally, such as Shopify, Magna, Constellation Software and OpenText. We need to protect and nurture our intellectual property and talent in the same way we protect our lumber, precious minerals and oil and gas resources.
In April of 2021, MaRS wrote a white paper we called “Good, Better, Best”, outlining the pathways to drive long-term economic sustainability for Canada. Unfortunately, Canada's choices have largely been in the “good” category. This is where we license our IP directly or where larger foreign-owned entities establish a Canadian-based R and D centre as a result of acquisition or via government stimulus. This is not in our “better” and “best” categories. The recent deal with Volkswagen to invest $13 billion to be matched with a largely in-kind contribution of $7 billion into a Canadian-based EV gigafactory is a case-in-point example of good outcomes.
Current market conditions are threatening to erase hard-won gains for this stage of growth in the last five to seven years, putting urgent pressure on Canada's ability to build our own knowledge-based economies that allow us to build and to add persistent value in the global value chain to create new industries.
Domestic SMEs have to compete with foreign multinationals with much deeper pools of capital for talent and market share. The sheer volume of Canadian R and D talent working for multinationals, both in and out of the country, plays a role in driving economic performance outside of Canada, allowing other major economies to outperform on the global stage.
The World Intellectual Property Organization's global innovation index ranking shows Canada progressing slowly year over year based on the strength of our innovation inputs, but our lack of domestic commercial outputs in key advanced industries is keeping us from regaining top-10 global status and increasing our productivity and GDP numbers.
It's for all of these reasons that MaRS remains laser-focused on the critical underserved middle stage of the economic growth cycle. This is the key to convert IP and translational research into high-growth, category-leading companies that are domestically headquartered global firms. As the global value chain increasingly shifts from the tangible to intangible-based economies, the long-term risks to Canada of not fostering and growing category-leading, Canadian-headquartered advanced industry firms are severe.
We need a critical mass of start-ups in our ecosystem that are able to scale into companies that anchor intellectual property-focused industries in Canada and solve for major impacts on the world.
This is why we need at least—