Breaking Innovation Paralysis

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 lif...

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, custom...

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 Sc...

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, no...

Dr. Kostas Trakas is a pharma builder and former Johnson & Johnson executive, and co-founder of Exsilios Pharma — a Canadian specialty pharmaceutical company that sources FDA, EMA, and MHRA-approved late-stage assets and secures Canadian commercialization rights across rare disease, oncology, immunology, CNS, and cardiometabolic indications. He holds a PhD and a Master's in pharmacology from the University of Toronto, and...

Dr. Anu Rebbapragada has spent over two decades translating diagnostic innovation into clinically trusted, commercially viable services — as a clinical microbiologist and high-complexity lab director, a national leader across Canadian diagnostic lab networks, a MedTech executive at a Fortune 500 global diagnostics company, and a strategic advisor to entrepreneurial ventures. She holds a PhD in microbiology and molecular genet...

Dr. Andrew Maxwell has spent three decades studying how people inside institutions actually make innovation decisions, from his early years at ABB through a PhD examining investor judgment to his current role as a professor of technology and entrepreneurship at York University's Lassonde School of Engineering. He's the founder of the BEST program, author of the Innovation Doctor series on Substack, and runs Avatar Innovations, work...

David Carter has spent 13 years as CEO of Innovation Factory, Hamilton's regional innovation centre, helping founders in tech, digital health, and advanced manufacturing bring their ideas to market. Before that, he built and scaled his own software company and worked as a CTO, experience that still shapes how he thinks about product growth and what it actually takes to scale. He's also a co-founder of the Synapse Life Science Conso...

Walter Robinson is a bilingual public affairs executive with 30 years of policy, legislative, and regulatory experience at every level of Canadian government — from federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, where his testimony helped shape the Romanow Commission, to Chief of Staff at Ottawa City Hall, to VP roles at Innovative Medicines Canada and senior pharma leadership at Purdue. Alongside that, he's built a p...

Marc-Antoine Benglia has spent three decades studying why some innovation ecosystems outperform others, starting with graduate research in 1993 comparing Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and Sophia Antipolis using an expanded version of Porter's Diamond framework. He's since built and sold two companies out of Ottawa, Hemera (acquired by Jupiter Media) and Axentra Corporation, whose spinoff Kwilt was acquired by Western Digital. He now l...

Dr. Gerry Wright has spent 33 years at McMaster University, and this year his lab had an extraordinary run: four new antibiotic candidates, including lariocidin, a discovery published in Nature that targets a vulnerability no antibiotic on the market currently exploits. He's also spent two decades on the other side of the table, reviewing grants for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and he's lived the commercializa...

Amos Adler has spent nearly two decades as founder and CEO of MEMOTEXT Corp, a digital patient engagement platform built to drive medication adherence through personalized, evidence-based messaging. He later co-founded A4i, a joint venture with CAMH supporting people living with schizophrenia through digital engagement, and is now building MTXT.ai, aimed at compressing the years-long gap between a validated research idea and an act...

Dr. Nadine Tatton is a University of Toronto-trained neuroscientist who has spent her career at the intersection of neurodegenerative disease research and drug development. She helped grow the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration's research funding from $250,000 to $6 million, plus another $10 million in partnered programs, later supported strategy at Alector, and most recently served as executive director of the Critical Pa...

Welcome to the premiere episode of Breaking Innovation Paralysis, where we dive into the urgent need for change within Canada's health innovation ecosystem.

A Bold Vision for Canada

Natalie Yeadon opens the series with a powerful proposal from Dr. Kevin Smith, president and CEO of Toronto's University Health Network. He envisions Canada as the top destination for taking scientific discoveries to market. Yet, as Yeadon points out, Ca...