How Canada‑LATAM‑US Innovation Corridors are taking shape

The funding architecture problem

Major North American funding programmes reinforce the pattern Echeverría-King describes. Take, for instance, the US National Science Foundation's international initiatives, which typically require a US‑based principal investigator to apply for and manage grants, even when the research takes place primarily in Latin America.

Similarly, Canada's New Frontiers in Research Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's international partnership programmes require that the nominated principal investigator have a primary affiliation with a Canadian institution, meaning that Latin American partners cannot serve as the lead applicant.

The result is a structural dependency that corridor rhetoric tends to gloss over. Latin American researchers can access international networks and equipment, but they rarely lead. Grant budgets, intellectual property arrangements and publication strategies are frequently controlled by the northern institution. Over time, this can suppress the growth of research management capacity in Latin America and limit the ability of local universities to set their own innovation agendas.

Putting numbers on this imbalance is difficult, but findings from the Global Innovation Index offer some guidance: the Latin American and Caribbean region has seen a shrinking share of global R&D from 3% in 2000 to just under 2% in 2024, with Brazil, Argentina and Mexico all recording declines.

While co-authorship between North and South American researchers has risen over the past two decades, recent studies have found that the corresponding funding flows have not become more balanced.

Echeverría‑King’s IDRC‑funded research, published in the journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, puts empirical weight behind these concerns. The project’s focus groups with Venezuelan diaspora researchers revealed a community eager to collaborate but forced to rely on informal networks.

One research participant described the existing channels as little more than “former colleagues or friends”. The study’s comparative analysis across Latin America found that even countries with stated policies often lack the instruments to evaluate whether those policies are working. In Colombia, the study found, there is “no institutional or political instrument that evaluates the effectiveness of both science diplomacy and the scientific diaspora”,

The article reinforces her core point: the problem is not a shortage of talent or willingness, but a missing institutional layer. Without joint funding calls, shared governance structures, streamlined visa pathways and long-term partnership agreements, even the most promising collaborations remain isolated and short-lived.

Why the demand for collaboration is growing

The urgency of addressing this imbalance grows amid intensifying economic forces that are pushing North America and Latin America closer together. Since 2020, supply‑chain disruptions and US‑China trade tensions have accelerated nearshoring: the relocation of production and services closer to consumer markets.

According to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), foreign direct investment inflows into the region rose by 7.1% in 2024, reaching nearly US$189 billion. Manufacturing drew the largest share of that investment at 43.6%, with services at 40.4% and natural resources at 16%.

Yet, ECLAC’s research reveals that such Foreign Direct Investment inflows have yet to be translated into deeper productive linkages. Project announcements in technology‑intensive sectors lost ground in 2024, with Latin America and the Caribbean only capturing 7% of global Foreign Direct Investment linked to digital transformation.

In critical minerals, an area where Canadian firms accounted for 20% of announced projects between 2005 and 2024, Latin America remains overwhelmingly an exporter of unprocessed materials rather than a hub for higher‑value innovation. ECLAC's analysis shows that 62% of the region's critical mineral exports between 2019 and 2023 were either unprocessed or subject only to basic refining, highlighting a persistent failure to move up the value chain.

Closing these gaps will require the kind of sustained, institution‑to‑institution research partnerships that Echeverría‑King describes. If the region cannot build innovation corridors that go beyond extraction and assembly, the nearshoring wave will reinforce old patterns rather than transform them.

The IDRC project she co‑leads suggests an alternative: a model in which Latin American institutions set the research agenda, diaspora networks are treated as strategic assets rather than losses, and collaboration is designed to survive beyond a single funding cycle.

The summit as a signal

The QS Americas summit panel on innovation corridors will take up precisely this question of institutional design. Alongside Echeverría‑King, panellists from Mexico’s Universidad Panamericana and Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito are expected to share their own experiences of building north‑south partnerships, often through bilateral agreements and project‑based work.

But Echeverría‑King’s message, backed by the IDRC project she helps lead, suggests that good intentions and isolated partnerships are not enough.

“With sustained institutional support,” she says, “initiatives like this can redefine research collaboration between Latin America and North America as more inclusive, reciprocal and impactful partnerships.”

Getting there, however, will require a deliberate shift in how funding is designed, how institutions share control, and how success is measured. The missing piece is not another declaration of intent, but institutional machinery: joint funding calls, shared governance structures, streamlined visa pathways and long‑term partnership agreements that allow collaboration to weather changes in government or institutional leadership.

The question is no longer whether these corridors will develop, but whether they will develop the institutional foundations that allow them to last. For North American universities and businesses, the risk is not arriving too late. It is arriving with a model of partnership that hasn't kept pace with the region's growing research capacity.