Dr. Kean Birch holds the Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy at York University, where he has spent more than a decade studying the political economy of science, technology, and innovation. He is co-editor, with Fabian Muniesa, of Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (MIT Press), currently holds the Otto Mønsted Visiting Professorship at Copenhagen Business School, and co-edits the journal Science as Culture. His core concept, assetization, describes how things are turned into assets that someone can own, control, and extract future revenue from — a lens that reframes Canada's innovation problem as a question of ownership, not invention.

In this conversation, Dr. Birch and Natalie start at the bench, where researchers and innovators run on opposite logics: researchers pursue what isn't yet known, while innovators know where they want to go but not how to get there. People who can do both are rare, which is why ecosystems have to deliberately bring them together. He argues that early founders need accessible money to take risks, not venture capital, which only a tiny fraction of companies ever touch. He traces Canada's sell-the-resource instinct into its financial system, where public markets reward banks and miners, and explains why acquisition beats IPO for investors: acquirers pay a knowledge premium that general public-market investors won't.

The conversation turns to his sharpest diagnosis: finance has replaced innovation as the endpoint. Instead of using finance to fund innovation, the system now uses innovation to generate financial returns, and founders absorb that logic from day one, building toward an exit rather than a product, market, or company. He describes the "moments of valuation" every founder faces, from the first angel conversation to borrowing, acquisition, or IPO, each demanding a different story. On tokenization, he sees real potential to open startup investment beyond accredited investors, but only with a solid legal and regulatory foundation underneath.

On health data, Birch is blunt: an individual's data is worth pennies, but pooled, curated, and de-identified, it becomes enormously valuable. His proposal is a data wealth fund, held collectively like a natural resource fund in a public entity at arm's length from the government, with the power to improve data quality and set terms for access. He closes on what governments must do to govern assetization rather than react to it: avoid investment commitments that lock future citizens into today's decisions, and stop concentrated capital from dictating the direction of innovation itself.

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.

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