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Category: Government

Asleep at the Switch…

… is the name of a new(ish) book by Bruce Smardon of York University, which looks at the history of federal research & development policies over the last half-century.  It is a book in equal measures fascinating and infuriating, but given that our recent change of government seems to be a time for re-thinking innovation policies, it’s a timely read if nothing else. Let’s start with the irritating.  It’s fairly clear that Smardon is an unreconstructed Marxist (I suppose structuralist is

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January 29, 2016 No Comments

An Update on England’s Teaching Excellence Framework

Last week, the UK Minister for Business Innovation and Skills (which is responsible for higher education) released a green paper on higher ed.  It covered a lot of ground, most of which need not detain us here; I think I have a reasonable grasp of my readers’ interests, and my guess is that the number of you who have serious views about whether the Office For Fair Access should be merged into a new Office for Students, along with the

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November 10, 2015 2 Comments

Theories of Change

One of the easiest things to do in policy is to advocate for policy X, so as to change effect Y.  One of the hardest things to do is to get people to explain clearly their theory of change.  That is, what are the steps by which changing X actually affects Y? Take performance-based funding.  It’s easy to get hot for the idea that organizations can be steered by offering incentives: if you pay schools for students, they’ll raise enrolment. 

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August 27, 2015 2 Comments

The Evolution of Institutional Government Relations

I was speaking yesterday at the Government Relations Officers Conference in Banff, and it got me thinking about how the field has changed over the last 20 years. I started in government relations back in 1996, working for the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) – now “Universities Canada”.  Back then, most medium-to-large institutions had government relations officers, but not government relations offices.  There would be one person, maybe with an assistant.  Their role was essentially to act as

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May 5, 2015 1 Comment

The State is not Entrepreneurial

If you’re interested in innovation policy, and haven’t spent time under a rock for the last couple of years, you’ve probably heard of Mariana Mazzucato.  She’s the professor economics at the University of Sussex who wrote The Entrepreneurial State, which is rapidly becoming the source of an enormous number of errors as far as science and economic policy are concerned. Mazzucato’s work got a fair bit of publicity when it was released for pointing out that a lot of private sector

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April 23, 2015 1 Comment
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