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Category: Innovation

Time for CARPA?

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the magical days of 2021-22 when Canada still cared about things like innovation and a huge debate raged about how to do it properly, so that for once Canada might not be dead last in the OECD for things like productivity growth.  Basically, there were two camps in this debate. One said that the way to achieve it was to copy the American system of ARPAs (Advanced Research Projects Agencies, of which the OG

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March 11, 2025 2 Comments

How We Choose to Respond to Crises

I was thinking the other day that next Thursday (27/02/25) is not only going to be the Ontario election—about which, more tomorrow—but also because it will be the 30th anniversary of the legendary 1995 federal budget. If you’re under 45, a lot of what I am about to tell you is going to sound very odd. But it is all true, and it all matters. This country was a hot mess in the early 1990s. The summer 1990 unemployment rate

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February 18, 2025 3 Comments

For and Against Differentiation

I have had a few interesting chats over the past couple of months about the issue of institutional differentiation and its desirability. You will recall perhaps that I spoke favourably about it back in the fall as a means of bringing greater focus to institutional strategy. From these conversations, I have come to understand the need to be clearer about how one is defining the term “differentiation,” because it has two different possible meanings. Most often, I find that people

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February 10, 2025 4 Comments

Are We Lacking AI-mbition?

If you’ve been following the latest developments on artificial intelligence (AI) in recent months, you’ve probably seen that higher education institutions all around the world are more and more aggressively starting to incorporate GenAI into their ways of doing. We’ve all seen Arizona State University announce its partnership with OpenAI at the beginning of 2024. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, on its end, has started to invite artificially generated ‘academics’ to teach to students in between lectures from real-life instructors, and

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May 7, 2024 2 Comments

Are We Out of Ideas?

I was prepping yesterday for my podcast interview with Australian higher education expert Andrew Norton on the subject of the Australian Universities’ Accord (watch for it a week tomorrow) and while reading the report—which is a competent one, as these things go—it occurred to me: my God, this is boring. Used to be you could count on the Australians to come up with at least one or two cool ideas that would make you think” “really? We can do that?”

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March 20, 2024 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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