Breaking Innovation Paralysis

Natalie Yeadon, Founder and CEO, Augmentios
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Canada builds world-class cures and companies, then consistently loses them. Breaking Innovation Paralysis investigates why, through candid conversations with the founders, scientists, and policymakers living this reality every day. Host Natalie Yeadon, a former clinician, pharmaceutical executive, and tech entrepreneur who built and exited a global Canadian company, traces the problem to three forces: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility. Each episode goes inside a different layer of the system, from university labs to government policy, to find out how to fix.

  1. 3d ago

    Approved, Not Covered: Why New Drugs Stall in Canada.

    Ayotola Ogunsipe is a pharmacist turned market access leader who sits at the intersection of private payers and the pharmaceutical industry. As Senior Advisor, Business Development at Express Scripts Canada, he represents insurers such as Manulife, Sun Life and Desjardins when manufacturers’ market access teams bring new therapies to Canada. He began his career as a pharmacist in Nigeria, earned a Master of Science in Pharmacology from the University of Lagos, led medical services for a major Lagos electricity utility, and co-founded a last-mile delivery company that brought prescription medications from retail pharmacies to patients. He came to Canada for his MBA at the Ivey Business School at Western University, where he was co-president of the Health Sector Club. He then worked as a RISE Fellow at Marsh McLennan and as a business consultant in Payer Solutions at TELUS Health. He is a certified Project Management Professional and Financial Modeling and Valuation Analyst, and writes regularly about market access, drug pricing and Canada’s life sciences ecosystem. Ayotola starts behind the pharmacy counter, where patients kept leaving without their medication because of back orders. That experience still shapes how he negotiates today: “it’s one thing to get a product listed on a formulary,” he says, but patients also need to get it at the right time. He then looks at insulin and GLP-1s, two classes of medicine that grew out of Canadian science and that Canada now negotiates to buy back, and asks how the country could keep licensing, ownership and value at home. He explains why clinical trials run in Canada matter long after the trial ends. When Canadian physicians and Canadian patients generate the data, reviewers have more confidence in it, and coverage decisions can move faster. He walks through the long road from Health Canada approval to coverage: health technology assessment by CDA or INESSS, negotiation with the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance, and provincial listing. Together, these steps can mean a drug approved in 2026 isn’t covered until 2028. The conversation turns to most favoured nation pricing in the US, and why some manufacturers are now launching to private plans first and delaying public negotiations. Ayotola explains how that moves risk onto private payers and employers, why he expects premiums to rise, and why he thinks drugs discovered with AI may raise costs before they lower them. His message is that approval and access are two very different things, and Canada has to manage both. 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 #MarketAccess #DrugPricing #ClinicalTrials #PharmaPolicy #LifeSciences

  2. Oct 20

    Nothing Sells Itself: Why Canada’s Best Health Data Sits in Silos.

    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. 🔗 Questions, feedback, or want to connect? https://augmentios.com/contact 📩 Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/BIPLinkedInNewsletter #BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #HealthData #PrecisionMedicine #Pharmacogenomics #DigitalHealth #LifeSciences #ClinicalTrials

  3. Oct 15

    Same Cost, 1/10 the Market: Why Canadian MedTech Goes South First.

    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. In this conversation, Bob and Natalie start with what two decades of selling into operating rooms taught him. In the US, he sold directly to the OR supervisors who held the purse strings. In Canada, buying decisions sat at the provincial level, and offering refurbished equipment at a third to half the cost of new, with an equal or better warranty, got no traction at all. He then takes us inside university tech transfer, where he estimates 80 to 85% of IP sits in a folder because no one is there to champion it. UBC did something rare: it combed its own portfolio and recruited an outside founder to commercialize a promising technology. He explains why the license is the company, why his first term sheet was a deal-breaker, and why universities move at a very different speed from business. The conversation turns to capital and the road to market. Chondros Bio faces a seven-to-eight-year path to FDA approval, which means finding patient investors. A competitor's approval, and its roughly $330 million acquisition by Smith & Nephew, cleared both a regulatory and a reimbursement path for him. He is candid about why medtech goes south first: approval costs about the same in Canada as in the US, for a market a tenth the size. He knows three Canadian-founded companies that moved to the US for funding, one of which reincorporated in Delaware for US investors. His one ask of Ottawa is a Canadian SBIR: true grants companies can draw on like an ATM, rather than matching or reimbursement funding that forces founders to find the money first. Without it, he warns, the US researchers Canada is now recruiting may do their science here and build their companies back home. He closes on a personal note: married to a Canadian, he's here to stay, and so is Chondros Bio for as long as he can keep it here. 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 #TechTransfer #MedTech #LifeSciences #SBIR #Commercialization #RegenerativeMedicine

  4. Oct 13

    18 Months, $10 Million: Why Canada’s Innovation Playbook Is About to Expire.

    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. In this conversation, Khayat and Natalie start with why she traded "innovation" for foresight. Her test is simple: unless something unlocks five times more value than the status quo, it isn't innovation. Since ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, she argues, the foresight planning window has collapsed from ten-plus years to about three. She makes the case for a new way of funding research (when everyone has the same grant writer, scoring can no longer separate the best ideas) and describes an era of AI-accelerated science in which drug discovery that once took 15 years and $3 billion may take 18 months and $10 million. New entrants like Google and OpenAI are moving in fast; she notes that OpenAI's foundation alone has a $25 billion life sciences fund, "like 12 CIHRs" from one company. The conversation turns to risk. Khayat argues that Canada's real barrier is mindset: we are wired to spot every risk but rarely calculate the opportunity cost of not acting, and until that changes, capital alone won't fix it. She urges founders to look beyond traditional venture capital to venture philanthropy, family offices, donor-advised funds, and the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in Canadian history, and to spend a third of their time telling their story. On sovereignty, she sees a hidden Canadian advantage. Hospital records sit largely on American EMR systems, but most other Canadian health data lives on Canadian-built platforms in primary care, home care, and long-term care. She closes with a reason for optimism: Canada's brand is at an all-time high, and startups are fielding inbound calls from partners who no longer want to do business with the US. It's a window few could have seen coming three years ago. 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 #HealthFutures #LifeSciences #AIinHealthcare #DrugDiscovery #HealthData #EconomicSovereignty

  5. Oct 8

    Worker Bees or Owners? Breaking Canada's Branch-Plant Habit.

    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

  6. Oct 6

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

    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. 🎧 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 #InnovationPolicy #HealthData #EconomicSovereignty

  7. Sep 29

    The Scale-Up Gap: Why Canada's Best Companies Sell Before They Scale.

    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

  8. Sep 22

    No Anchor Companies: Why Canada Can't Build a Biotech Cluster.

    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 spent over a decade at J&J in global marketing and market access leadership, including building companion diagnostic policy platforms and public-private partnership models across EMEA and LatAm. Before Exsilios, he led Exactis Innovation, taking Canada's largest oncology real-world evidence network from a grant-funded model toward commercial self-sufficiency. He writes and speaks publicly on where Canada's Life Sciences Task Force has fallen short, and is currently pivoting Exsilios toward developing early-stage Canadian IP into a genuine anchor company. In this conversation, Dr. Trakas and Natalie trace the entire pipeline from the ground up. It starts with the argument that Canada's most underused strategic asset isn't a new discovery at all — it's the tokenized, longitudinally-linked health data sitting inside a single-payer system, an asset the fragmented, privately-insured US system structurally can't replicate, and one Canada still won't let researchers actually access. From there it moves into funding: Dr. Trakas's own experience inheriting ten years of grant-funded operations and being told to make them commercially self-sufficient, his blunt dismissal of Canada's incubator and accelerator model as "checkbox" theatre, and the pension fund paradox where the Maple Eight are structurally barred by their own fiduciary rules from investing in the small domestic companies that need them most — a policy Canada wrote into its own regulations roughly twenty years ago and has never revisited. The conversation turns next to why Canadian founders default to selling rather than building — Dr. Trakas's own theory that Canadians settle for being what he calls the "second banana," happy to sell at the first good offer rather than aspiring to build the next Shopify — and what it would actually take to produce Canada's first true anchor companies and the biotech clusters that follow them. From there they dismantle the reimbursement gauntlet directly: Dr. Trakas's case for collapsing the PMPRB, CDA-AMC, and pCPA into a single agency instead of three sequential closed-door negotiations that can take a product two years to reach a single provincial formulary, set against the reality that Canadians access only about 18% of globally available medicines versus an OECD average of 28%. The episode closes on the geopolitical stakes: China's decade-long playbook of steel, then EVs, now life sciences, and why Dr. Trakas believes Canada can run the same playbook rather than keep funding runway for other countries to take off. 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

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About

Canada builds world-class cures and companies, then consistently loses them. Breaking Innovation Paralysis investigates why, through candid conversations with the founders, scientists, and policymakers living this reality every day. Host Natalie Yeadon, a former clinician, pharmaceutical executive, and tech entrepreneur who built and exited a global Canadian company, traces the problem to three forces: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility. Each episode goes inside a different layer of the system, from university labs to government policy, to find out how to fix.

Information

  • Creator
    Natalie Yeadon, Founder and CEO, Augmentios
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Natalie Yeadon, Founder and CEO, Augmentios
  • Show Website
    Breaking Innovation Paralysis