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Category: Innovation

A Shift in Rhetoric on Innovation

Could a shift in thinking about innovation lead to a radical reduction in university research budgets? Time was, universities could tell a pretty simple story about innovation. Give money to talented people in universities (preferably “world-class” ones), and let them work on interesting projects. Through the magic of peer-reviewed publication, knowledge will be transferred, entrepreneurs will get cool ideas for products, and massive innovation and productivity growth will ensue. But while universities argue for better funding because technological booms based

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November 22, 2012 No Comments

Reforming J-Schools

I see that a number of foundations – including the Knight, McCormick and Scripps-Howard Foundation– have written an open letter  to American university presidents, urging that they make Journalism schools “more like medical schools” and teaching them through immersion in “clinical, hands-on, real-life experience”. From a historical perspective, this is a deeply weird development. Foundations have played a significant role in changing the course of professional education on a couple of occasions. In 1910, the American Medical Association and the

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October 31, 2012 2 Comments

More Korean Lessons

Higher education is an inherently conservative industry – it’s extremely rare to come across something genuinely new and unique in the field. Which is precisely why Korea’s so interesting: it has a number of genuine system innovations, particularly in lifelong learning, from which a lot of countries could learn. Koreans have what some commentators call “education fever”; as in many Confucian countries, the sacrifices families make to ensure their children get an education are almost incomprehensible to North Americans. But

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October 19, 2012 No Comments

Architecture and the Role of the University

Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, once described the university as “a collection of departments tied together by a common steam plant.” There’s some truth to this. Most academics will profess more loyalty to a discipline than an institution. Disciplines fight amongst each other for resources and the departmental structure they occupy has enormous possibilities for empire building. The only thing that really unites them is the heating plant (and perhaps the Finance and HR people

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May 31, 2012 1 Comment

Well, That Was Interesting

The Report of the Expert Panel on R&D, that is. It’s an intriguing and well-written piece of work (kudos to Peter Nicholson), at least as much for what it doesn’t say as what it does. There are three things this report does extremely well: i) it explains the mind-boggling number of tiny programs the federal government supports, ii) it graphically shows how the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program massively overshadows all other panels combined and iiI), it amusingly tells

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October 18, 2011 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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