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Category: Innovation

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 1)

You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in which I find it lacking. Before I start, two nota benes (notas bene?). First, no one has paid HESA to do this analysis. This is a labour of…well, not love,

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May 19, 2026 No Comments

Lectures, Essays, Genies, and Bottles

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education printed a kind of farewell interview with the University of Waterloo’s outgoing President Vivek Goel. Like many THE interviews of this nature, it’s a bit of an odd duck, spending half the time explaining to a global audience who this person is and why they and their institution are important and leaving only a couple of hundred words for the subject to say anything useful about their own legacy and the future. But what Goel did say

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May 13, 2026 No Comments

Hidden Factors in Innovation

I want to draw everyone’s attention to an excellent new thesis on innovative universities from the Netherlands. It’s called Success Factors for Innovative Universities by Daryna (Dara) Melnyk, which I think many of you would find a useful read (some of you may remember Dara from when she joined the World of Higher Education podcast back here; you may also be familiar with her own webinar on innovative universities which you can find here). To be clear, Dara’s definition of

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April 29, 2026 1 Comment

The Crux

One of my favourite authors on strategy is Richard Rummelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which I highly recommend to anyone. He has a newish book (2022) out called The Crux which I read a few weeks ago. Today, I want to talk about it in relation to higher education. The thesis of this book, as the name suggests, is that too often strategy does not create an organizational improvement because it does not deal squarely with the key problems that the organization actually

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March 18, 2026 3 Comments

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between skills and innovation. Innovation, to be clear, is not “invention”. It’s not about discovering some new idea or application and then building a world-beating company around. This might be the tech

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March 10, 2026 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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