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Category: Innovation

Changes to Canada’s Innovation Landscape

Yesterday, I described a variety of different type of innovation organizations around the world and suggested that part of the problem in Canada is that the federal government has difficulty understanding any kind of innovation agency whose mission is not “give out more gobs of cash”, because in today’s Ottawa it is expenditure which indicates virtue, not the outcomes of those expenditures. So, given that, how do we evaluate two significant recent changes to the innovation ecosystem in Canada? The

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March 15, 2023 No Comments

Can Canada Out-think the Underpants Gnomes?

I recently read a fascinating book called “How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation  Needs Bureaucracy “ by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo, all of whom are influenced by Marianna Mazucatto, whose work I have discussed here and here.  It’s fascinating for two reasons: first, that the book says next to nothing about how making the state more entrepreneurial or why innovation needs bureaucracy, but it is a very inclusive history of the types innovation policy structures

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March 14, 2023 No Comments

That Bill Morneau Book

I read Where to From Here: A Path To Canadian Prosperity, by former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, this weekend.  I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone else read it – it is bland, provides almost no new insight into the workings of the Trudeau government, and the “aw shucks can’t we all be more decent and moderate?” shtick gets old fast. But it has an important lesson for the post-secondary education sector.  And that is: the sector counts for nothing in Ottawa

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January 30, 2023 4 Comments

Evaluating the Superclusters

Yes, this again.  Why?  Because a few weeks ago the feds released an economic analysis of the benefits of Innovation Superclusters (recently rebranded as Global Innovation Clusters to make them sound slightly less ridiculous).  It’s horrible analysis, but since this topic unites my twin pastimes of making fun of crap economic impact analysis and crap pseudo-industrial policy, I could not resist.   Some background: early in the Liberals’ first term, they announced that the key to growth was clusters – that

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September 19, 2022 1 Comment

CARPA vs Tekes/IIA.

As noted back in our budget commentary, the Government of Canada seems to have abandoned the idea of a Canadian Advanced Research Projects Agency (CARPA – see here, here and here for previous takes on this) in favour of a yet-to-be-named innovation-and-investment agency said to be based on the Finnish agency Tekes and the Israel Innovation Authority.   A number of people have asked me to explain what the difference is between the two.  As always, I am here to oblige:

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April 12, 2022 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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