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Category: Innovation

What Is Innovation/Innovation Policy, Anyway?

I write and tweet a lot about innovation policy, mainly with respect to my frustration with our current government’s two-dimensional views on the subject.  I’ve been meaning to write a piece on how to do innovation policy right, but based on a number of conversations I’ve had with folks, I think it’s important first to deal with the question of: “what is innovation” and “what is innovation policy”? Because frankly these terms are getting slung around with such abandon that

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March 15, 2017 2 Comments

Tea Leaves on the Rideau

Last Tuesday, federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau set the date for the federal budget for next Wednesday (March 22) and naturally people are wondering: what goodies are in store?  Without being privy to any inside information, here’s my take on where we are going. At the press conference announcing the budget date, Minister Morneau dropped some important hints.  The biggest one is that, contrary to what had been heavily promoted for the past year, this budget will not be an

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March 13, 2017 1 Comment

The “Not Enough Engineers” Canard

Yesterday I suggested that Ottawa might be as much of the problem in innovation policy as it is the solution.  Today I want to make a much stronger policy claim: that Canada has a uniquely stupid policy discourse on innovation.   And as Exhibit A in this argument I want to present a piece posted over at Policy Options last week. The article was written by Kat Nejatian, a former staffer to Jason Kenney and now CEO of a payment technology company

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February 28, 2017 2 Comments

Can Ottawa Do Innovation?

The National Post’s David Akin had a useful article last week entitled Canada Has Failed at Innovation for 100 years: Can The Trudeau Government Change That?  Read it, it’s good.  It’s based around a new-ish Peter Nicholson article in Canadian Public Policy which is unfortunately not available without a subscription.  But Nicholson’s argument appears to be: we’ve done pretty well our entire history as a country copying or importing technology from Americans: what exactly is it that Ottawa is going

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February 27, 2017 4 Comments

Two Studies to Ponder

Sometimes, I read research reports which are fascinating but probably wouldn’t make for an entire blog post (or at least a good one) on their own.  Here are two from the last couple of weeks. Research vs. Teaching Much of the rhetoric around universities’ superiority over other educational providers is that their teachers are also at the forefront of research (which is true if you ignore sessionals, but you’d need a biblically-sized mote in your eye to miss them).  But

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February 21, 2017 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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