Built Here, Owned Elsewhere: The Assetization of Canadian Innovation.

Neelam Bance is a health care entrepreneur who spent most of her career in the pharmaceutical industry, in sales and marketing across diabetes, mental health, neurology and oncology at companies like Eli Lilly and Sunovion, before moving into health technology and precision medicine. She co-founded MedGeneius, a software platform that translates pharmacogenetic test results into guidance that helps clinicians choose the medications most likely to work for each patient. She is now co-founder and CEO of ODINsight Canada, which aims to securely connect Canada’s health data contributors and beneficiaries to fuel breakthroughs, accelerate innovation and drive economic growth. She is also Director of Business Development, Specialty Therapeutics, at Auxilium Health. Neelam founded the Asha Alliance, sits on the board of Yellow Brick House, and holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business and a biology degree from the University of Toronto. Neelam starts with what pharma taught her, and why it began to feel like “rinse and repeat”: global teams set the strategy, and Canada localized it. A sudden personal upheaval made her fearless. She asked herself what the worst that could happen really was, and for the first time in her life she took a chance on herself. She then takes us inside pharmacogenomics, where she says 99% of people, including many physicians, don’t know what the test is. Pharma launches drugs with armies of reps and medical science liaisons. Pharmacogenomic companies have to raise awareness across every specialty with a fraction of those resources. She explains why payers look at the cost of a cheap antidepressant instead of the cost of a patient who never gets back to work, and how Ontario began funding DPYD testing only once the evidence of patients dying from a common chemotherapy drug became impossible to ignore. The conversation turns to building a company outside the university grant system. Neelam bootstrapped while juggling three jobs, and promoted the only product she had at first: herself. Her advice to academic founders is blunt: nothing sells itself. She explains how a chance conversation at a MaRS event with a Canadian who had advised the White House led to ODINsight Canada, a consortium designed to let private health data holders, from clinic medical records to insurers and start-ups, share what their data contains without handing it over. The aim is to make Canada a place where pharmaceutical companies want to run their trials. Her one lever for success is trust. Building it takes time, conversations and the right people in the room, which she calls “the Canadian way.” This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility. If this shifted how you think about Canada’s innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it. 🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada’s innovation journey.

Bob Mighell is a serial entrepreneur who has spent nearly four decades building, scaling, and exiting companies. His first, Edge Snowboards, launched in 1985 at the start of the snowboard revolution. He then spent 20 years running World Medical Equipment, which outfitted surgical suites with high-end capital equipment and made the Puget Sound Business Journal's list of fastest-growing private companies eight times. He went on to found Tilting Motor Works to commercialize his own patents on tilting three-wheeled vehicles, sold it to publicly traded Arcimoto, and set two FIM world land speed records for three-wheeled motorcycles at the Bonneville Salt Flats. After nearly three years as entrepreneur in residence at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business, he did something unusual: he moved to Canada. He is now founder and CEO of Chondros Bio, a UBC spinout developing a regenerative hydrogel implant to repair cartilage and bone, and mentors startups with Creative Destruction Lab and Entrepreneurship@UBC. He holds engineering degrees from Dartmouth and an MBA from the University of Washington.

Dr. Zayna Khayat is one of Canada's best-known health futurists. She is Chief Program Officer at AMS Healthcare, a nonprofit working toward AI-ready, compassionate health systems, and adjunct faculty and executive in residence at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, where she has taught healthcare innovation since 2011. Until recently she was health futurist in residence with Deloitte Canada's healthcare and life sciences practice. Before that, she led the Health System Innovation Platform at MaRS Discovery District, served as innovation sherpa-in-chief at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and co-founded the Dutch Ministry of Health's Health Innovation School. She co-authored Future of Aging at SE Health, began her career with a PhD in biochemistry from U of T and SickKids, and was a principal in BCG's health practice. She has keynoted from South by Southwest to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Daniel Perry is Director of Federal Affairs at the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), where he leads national advocacy on behalf of Canada's high-growth scale-up companies. Named to The Hill Times' Top 100 Lobbyists for 2026, he has testified this year before three House of Commons standing committees — Industry and Technology, Finance, and Citizenship and Immigration — each time making the same case: capital, customers, talent, and sectoral strategy aren't separate policy files, they're one connected problem. He holds a Master of Political Management from Carleton University and has written a bi-weekly political column for the Niagara-Hamilton Independent since 2021. The conversation turns to risk. Perry shares the story of a CCI member who couldn't crack Canadian capital, flew to San Francisco, and closed a deal with an investor over drinks at the airport bar — a deal they said would have taken six to eight months at home. He is candid about the branch-plant economy, where Canadians become the worker bees while the real value flows elsewhere, and why every foreign investment should face one question: where does the IP live? When CCI loses members, he says, it's usually because a US acquirer or investor pulls the leadership team south. On healthcare, Perry calls it a national security asset. He points to CCI's Care at Scale report, which estimates that better, more portable health data could save up to $2.4 billion a year, and warns that Canadian health data stored on foreign servers can be reached by foreign governments — making Canadian-built "maple stack" infrastructure a sovereignty issue. He closes with CCI's budget priorities: a Canadian QSBS, a startup visa, a Buy Canada policy that supports genuinely Canadian companies rather than those Canadian in name only, and a reminder, borrowed from Red Green, that we're all in this together — but duct tape won't fix it this time. This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility. If this shifted how you think about Canada's innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it. 🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada's innovation journey. 🔗 Questions, feedback, or want to connect? https://augmentios.com/contact 📩 Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/BIPLinkedInNewsletter #BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #InnovationEcosystem #LifeSciences #InnovationPolicy #Procurement #HealthData #EconomicSovereignty

Dr. Jeffrey Crelinsten is the publisher of Research Money — Canada's leading source of intelligence on science, technology, and innovation funding — and founder of The Impact Group, an innovation-policy consultancy he started nearly 40 years ago. Research Money's readership is more than half government, plus university research leadership and the broader innovation ecosystem, and he runs its annual Ottawa conference, now heading into its 26th year. Most recently, with the Council of Canadian Innovators, he co-authored The Scale-Up Gap: From Value Creation to Value Retention, a study built on interviews with 31 founders of 30 Canadian companies that had reached real traction — customers, growth — and then sold to foreign buyers, asking them directly why. In this conversation, Dr. Crelinsten and Natalie start where the report starts: not with failure, but with founders who'd already succeeded, then hit a wall. They needed big capital fast and executive talent who'd scaled a company before, and Canada had neither in supply. Banks won't lend against intangible IP the way they lend against real estate, and Canadian VCs, founders told him bluntly, "don't lead rounds — they follow," waiting for a foreign lead investor and ceding control to whoever showed up first. His touchstone is Doug Barber's Genome Corporation, a Hamilton microchip maker that picked a niche too small for the giants — hearing-aid chips — and took 70% of the world market, proof a Canadian company can lead a global category if it's built to. The conversation turns to government procurement, worst of all in health: a medical device founder faces a different buyer, KPIs, and integration capacity in every hospital, and a different Ministry of Health in every province, so most give up and sell into the UK or US instead, where there's a single buyer. He traces the same failure into the university system: Canada leads the OECD in higher-education R&D spending but lags near the bottom in business R&D, because academic merit runs on peer-reviewed publications, and professors who help commercialize a student's idea are, in his account, penalized rather than rewarded — a sharp contrast to the US, where professors are paid only nine months a year and routinely take on industry contracts to cover the rest. On where the money is, Crelinsten is blunt: Canada is awash in capital sitting in pension funds, family offices, and RSPs, mostly parked in real estate. He points to OMERS Ventures under John Ruffalo — and the board fight it took to redirect even 3% of assets into venture — and adMare BioInnovations as proof the returns are there once someone commits. He also names the politics underneath every tax debate: politicians hear "help entrepreneurs build anchor companies" as "help people get rich," which capsized the capital-gains tax fight and keeps a siloed bureaucracy from acting on what its own frontline staff already know. He closes with a moonshot: federal, provincial, and municipal leaders publicly committing, Kennedy-style, to build five Canadian anchor companies in one sector — health and life sciences, since fixing that also fixes the healthcare system. This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility. If this shifted how you think about Canada's innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it. 🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada's innovation journey. 🔗 Questions, feedback, or want to connect? https://augmentios.com/contact 📩 Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/BIPLinkedInNewsletter #BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #InnovationEcosystem #LifeSciences #Biotech #Pharma #InnovationPolicy #EconomicSovereignty