I was recently at Waterloo, a small university town about an hour’s drive from Toronto, Canada where my friend John English has recently established the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) with support from Jim Balsillie, founder of the Blackberry communication system. The occasion was a CIGI conference on emerging powers.

While the academicians at the conference, signalled the arrival of India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico as the new powers, based on their share in global GDP and military expenditures, they missed what was happening around them. (The academicians also mentioned China but I believe that China is not an emerging power. It has already emerged as a major power.) Canada is emerging as a major centre of innovation in the future. Both, Arnold Toynbee and Paul Kennedy have demonstrated in their well-researched history books that the countries, which innovate, rise while the countries that overspend on military, decline. The fall of the Western Roman Empire 200 years before its Eastern counterpart, despite a relatively greater distance from external aggressors, was due to a difference in technological innovation and the quality of governance.

The Canadians seem to understand this well, without pretending any claim to a future great power status. Waterloo provides the maximum number of recruits to Microsoft every year. The founders of Blackberry have set up CIGI, an institute for research in theoretical physics, hoping that Canada of the future will make major breakthroughs in physics. The Governor of Ontario keeps personal charge of the department of research and innovation, indicating how important this portfolio is in provincial politics. The entire Waterloo region is promoted as a centre for research and development and the provincial government is going all out to attract investments from high tech companies.

More significantly, the Canadians have launched a quiet revolution for clean energy. I met my friend Nicholas Parker after several years to find that he has set up Cleantech Venture forum to bring together venture capitalists and small entrepreneurs exclusively in the field of clean energy. The big Alberta energy companies are focussed on research and development for clean energy in the future. Soon after my visit to Waterloo, the federal government announced a new immigration policy to attract talent from other parts of the world.

Besides Canada, we see emphasis on innovation in the Scandinavian countries. I flew from Toronto to Stockholm for a dinner with Dr. Michael Nobel, the chair of the Nobel Family Society. This family provides the Nobel prizes in the memory of Alfred Nobel, Dr Michael Nobel’s great granduncle. Now Dr. Michael Nobel is in the process of creating an award in the memory of Ludwig Nobel, his great grandfather and brother of late Alfred. The new award will be for innovation in energy.

Of course, the Nobel prizes merely symbolises the spirit of innovation in Scandinavia. It is a part of the world where several large and small companies have concentrated on technological research and innovation in governance. Nokia and Eriksson are famous companies in the communications sector. But there are several other technological experiments going on in agriculture and energy, medicine and metallurgy.

Interestingly, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Finland, with less than 1% of the world’s population among them, play an important role in the institutions of global governance. Their nationals hold key positions in the World Bank and various UN agencies. Their representatives lead many multilateral committees and set the global agenda more effectively than most other countries in the world, except of course the P-5 powers of the Security Council. As these countries win the technological race, their importance in trans-national commerce and the global economy is bound to increase in the future.

China has taken a clue from these developments. A few months ago, the government in Beijing identified five universities to be brought up to the level of the best in the world - including Harvard, Stanford and MIT, especially in the field of science and technology. The Chinese know that low cost goods can help attract investments and raise income in the short run but it is not the solution in the long run. Of course, the Chinese have a serious problem in their rural backyard. If they fail to manage it, their aspirations may disappear in a thousand revolutions.

For those who want to climb the ladder of science and technology much needs to be explored and invented. Sir Martin Rees, a leading British scientist, has come out with a succinct book, Our Final Century, which lists what science has yet to achieve. According to Sir Martin, it is too early to conclude that there are only three dimensions or that the earth is the only planet with biosphere. We know the history of time from the second moment after the big bang but it remains to be discovered what happened at the first moment and just prior to it. We know how life was created from one cell to multi-cell entities to the Cambrian explosion yet we do not know how the first cell came into being. Most dramatically, Sir Martin warns that it is too early to conclude that our biological evolution is complete. With the advent of biotechnology and nanotechnology the human species may evolve into semi-machines capable of proliferating and self-reproducing in the outer space, and perhaps beyond our solar system.

Some of these ideas may be the stuff of science fiction, but sometimes what might appear impossible to imagine might be a reality sooner than we would expect. In 1937, a group of leading American scientists failed to predict the rise of nuclear power, computers and the Internet.

With such a track record, of experts in predicting the future, some of Sir Martin’s fantasies may not be fantasies after all. The countries and companies that make a breakthrough in new, cheap, clean energy or the viability of outer space life or all purpose medicine are bound to be more influential than the countries that seek to gain a piece of territory here or there or throw out one or two small time dictators out of power. If I am looking for future power players, I would worry less about expensive weapon systems which are more likely to turn obsolete before they are ever used and keep my eyes and ears open to find out what comes out of the theoretical physics research institute in sleepy Waterloo.