(Credit: Peter Power/Postmedia files)Government investment in innovation yields early results, but loses steam later on as foreign buyers snatch up Canadian startups due to the lack of a robust homegrown ecosystem that lets them keep growing from Canada, according to a new Canadian Council of Innovators (CCI) report. "Because it's really hard to scale in Canada … we're systematically losing promising Canadian startups to foreign acquirers, along with their intellectual property and innovations," Laurent Carbonneau, vice-president of policy and advocacy at the tech advocacy group, said. The obstacles arise when Canadian companies start to scale. The founders also said they experienced challenges in securing early Canadian customers in both the public and private sectors due to hard-to-access procurement systems and companies unwilling to take risks on unproven technologies. "The result was a structural gap: the risks companies needed financed did not align with the risks that the domestic ecosystem was designed to absorb," the report said.