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Category: Innovation

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

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period. The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding

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December 21, 2012 1 Comment

Swings of the Pendulum

I see that Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class has been given a tenth anniversary re-release. This book was enormously influential in re-casting regional economic development with an urban-hipster ethos. “Downtowns are the bomb,” the argument went. “Do whatever you can to get as many talented people as you can to knock up against each other in a dense urban setting and economic growth will occur like magic.” Part Alfred Marshall, part Jane Jacobs, this argument struck a chord with

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November 28, 2012 No 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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