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Category: Innovation

Innovation Literature Fail

So, I’ve been reading Mariana Mazzucato’s, The Entrepreneurial State.  It’s brilliant and irritating, in equal measures.  Brilliant because of the way it skewers certain free-market riffs about the role of risk and entrepreneurialism in the innovation process, and irritating because it’s maddeningly cavalier about applying business terms to government processes (in particular, the term “risk”, which Mazzucato doesn’t seem to understand means something entirely different in government, if losses can be made whole through taxation). Anyways, one thing that occurred to me

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October 17, 2013 1 Comment

Time for a Talent Agenda

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been critical of cheap talk about “skills gaps”.   That doesn’t mean that I think business complaints about human resources are baseless; the calls of dissatisfaction are too loud and broad for that to be the case.  Business in many sectors has said loud and clear that it can’t get the workers it needs. The problem, I think, is that policymakers have concluded that the problem lies in the quantity of graduates in particular fields. 

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June 5, 2013 2 Comments

The Best Idea I’ve Seen All Year

I travel around a fair bit, and I get to see a lot of interesting stuff that’s going on at universities in Canada, and abroad.  People often ask me: what’s the best thing you’ve seen recently?  The answer this year, hands down, is UBC’s Start-up Services Voucher. Now, UBC’s been a leader in commercialization and spin-off companies for at least twenty years.  They caught a lot of attention when they created a $10 million Seed Fund, capitalized by donations from

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May 24, 2013 1 Comment

Canadian Innovation, Seen from Abroad

So, I came across this quite remarkable little document yesterday – it’s a report prepared by MIT-Skoltech on the universities around the world who contribute the most to their local innovation systems. (What is Skoltech, you ask?  Well, it’s a university located in a nascent science and tech hub, just outside Moscow, in a place called Skolkovo, and is the pet project of the Medvedev wing of the Kremlin.  Anchoring this tech hub is the new Skolkovo University of Science

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April 24, 2013 1 Comment

Better, not Cheaper

If there is one clear meme concerning higher education coming out of America during this recession, it’s this: “higher education is too expensive and it’s delivering a sub-optimal product.” Zeitgeist statements like this one have to be handled carefully.  Even if you don’t agree with this meme, failure to engage with it can expose one to charges of being “defensive,” or “part of the problem”.  So, for the moment, let’s accept this statement at face-value, and focus on how one

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January 14, 2013 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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