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Category: Innovation

Disturbing Portents for the Liberal Innovation Policy

Allow me to draw everyone’s attention to a piece last week in the Huffington Post called “How the Liberal Party Plans to Innovate the Way We Innovate”.  The piece was written by a Liberal-connected PR/GR flack named Greg MacNeil who works at “public affairs” (read: lobbying) firm Ensight Canada. MacNeil starts by asserting that “following Budget 2016, it is clear that when it comes to the innovation agenda, the government’s intentions are substantive”, which is nonsense: the budget simply introduced

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May 3, 2016 2 Comments

Going Overboard on Basic Research?

I’m getting some worrying vibes from the new federal government.  It’s nothing I can directly put my finger on (other than some annoying Ministerial tweets last week which seemed to claim that any money put into PSE infrastructure is ipso facto about “innovation”) but I get the sense that the new government is in danger of making some real mistakes with respect to innovation policy.  Specifically, I’m worried that in the rush to repudiate the Harper legacy in all things

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April 12, 2016 No Comments

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

Innovation Buzzword Bingo

Morning all.  Regular service will pushed back one week to January 10th, but I couldn’t let the Globe op-ed “Southern Ontario Should be an Innovation Cluster, Not a Farm Team” by three Ontario university presidents (McMaster’s Patrick Deane, Toronto’s Meric Gertler, and Waterloo’s Feridun Hamdullahpur) go without comment. The article reads like someone set out to fill a buzzword bingo card.  Words like “supercluster”, “resilient”, “enhancing interaction”, “external connectivity”, “cluster-building infrastructure”, and “entrepreneurship ecosystem” all duly make an appearance; hell, there’s even a

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January 4, 2016 6 Comments

Innovation Ecosystems: Promise and Opportunism

We sometimes think of innovation policy as being about generating better ideas through things like sponsored research.  And that’s certainly one part of it.  But if those ideas are generated in a vacuum, they go nowhere – making ideas spread faster is the second pillar of innovation policy (a third pillar – to the extent that innovation is about new product-generation – has to do with venture capital and regulatory environments, but we’ll leave those aside for now). Yesterday, I discussed why the key to speeding up

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December 8, 2015 2 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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