Grace Jaramillo, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada’s Program Manager, Trade, Investment, and Innovation, has won a 2019 International Policy Ideas Challenge award for her proposal to link Canada’s Innovative Supercluster Initiative in the Asia Pacific through the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (CPTPP), of which Canada is one of 11 member economies.
Jaramillo was among 10 Canadian post-doctoral fellows and early career researchers to win the award, organized annually by Global Affairs Canada in collaboration with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
“I presented the idea to Global Affairs Canada because I truly believe that Canada can maximize its Superclusters potential only if it has an international strategy early on to attract investment and create new markets for its products and innovative processes, particularly in the Asia Pacific,” said Jaramillo, whose proposal includes creating a global ecosystem for Canada’s Superclusters in which Canadian technology can make the best impact in terms of international development and trade diversification.
The objective of the International Policy Ideas Challenge is to source leading Canadian talent to identify concrete, innovative solutions to emerging international policy challenges faced by Canada. The winning projects receive C$3,000 each and their authors are given several months to consult with Global Affairs Canada client divisions and further develop their ideas into longer policy briefs. The policy briefs are then presented to Government of Canada officials in a day-long Ideas Symposium, hosted by Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa in late fall 2019.
“This award represents for me a critical juncture in my professional career as a scholar who is always trying to find the connection between economic development, international trade, and foreign policy,” added Jaramillo, a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo and the University of B.C., and former head of the International Relations Program at FLACSO, the largest academic think-tank in Latin America
APF Canada’s Dongwoo Kim, now Program Specialist, Technology Policy at the Foundation, received the same award in 2018 for a research project he proposed and since completed exploring implications for Canada vis-a-vis artificial intelligence (AI) policies in China, Japan, and South Korea.
