and neglected diseases involves fostering genuinely global consortia by building on existing bilateral consortia. As an illustration, Canada created in 2011, as a new element of its Networks of Centers of Excellence program, a bilateral Canada-India Research Center of Excellence (CIRCE) initiative. CIRCE recently announced the award of CAD 13.8 million in funding over five years to a consortium of Canadian and Indian universities, public sector research agencies, private-sector partners, and not-forprofit and non-governmental organizations.<sup>69</sup> The objective is to meet research objectives and create substantial impact in strategic areas such as alternative cleaner energy, water quality and resource management, advanced materials and sustainable urbanization, and other aspects of environmental sustainability. Once the fixed costs of setting up initiatives like this are incurred, it would require relatively little additional cost to enrich and globalize such bilateral consortia by including to existing platforms other appropriate participants, such as a relevant university researchers, private sector corporate researchers and entrepreneurs from other countries. CIRCE has indicated interest in complementing their bilateral consortium with relevant multilateral additions. The policy challenge is how best to fund such add-on initiatives, how best to identify and bring in the most appropriate complementary global talent, and how best to support the global dissemination and commercialization of the research findings.

# **V. CONCLUSION**

This paper has presented an initial exploration of the role of different types of KBC and the role of appropriate policies in supporting enterprise risk management, in particular reallocation and innovation decisions in response to changing demand and supply trends and unexpected shocks. It has argued that the increased flow and management of knowledge permitted by investments in KBC can be an important factor in reducing the decision risk facing enterprises due to uncertainty and imperfect information. It has highlighted that, absent appropriate policies, KBC investments can have adverse distributional effects on the enterprise sector and on people – including a skewed industrial concentration of productivity gains, and more unequal consumption and income-earning outcomes between rich and poor people. A key message is that insufficient enterprise risk-taking can be costly for the enterprise sector and the economy, as it results in too little experimentation and learning. And that policy has an important role to play in creating business environments that stimulate entrepreneurial experimentation, support skills upgrading, and promote mechanisms for joint learning through global collaboration.

Looking forward, there remains an important policy research agenda across countries with different levels of technological and institutional capacities and industrial structures to better understand the magnitude of investments in different types of KBC, their importance for enterprise risk management and impact on the enterprise sector and on people as consumers and income earners, and policy implications.

Regarding measurement, efforts are needed to collect better comparable data across developing countries by national governments supported by capacity building of national statistical agencies, at the level of both national accounts and individual firms (including farms and informal and formal non-farm enterprises). This work should be accompanied by testing and eventual systematic inclusion of additional national enterprise census and survey questions related to investments in different types of KBC and enterprise risk management. Regarding analysis and experimentation, it would be helpful to better

> 69 See http://www.nce-rce.gc.ca/Media-Medias/news-communiques/News-Communique_eng.asp?ID=120

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