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Category: Innovation

Missions and Moonshots

There is a crowd of policy entrepreneurs in Canada – mostly but not entirely Liberal, mostly but not entirely based in Ottawa – who have really cottoned on to the whole notion of innovation.  Like many of us who have despaired over successive governments’ lack of cluefulness on this issue, they are dissatisfied with the status quo.  Unfortunately, these people are currently marching with wholly unjustified confidence towards policies that are largely buzzword-driven. It’s not just this ludicrous notion of

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June 15, 2021 1 Comment

The Growth Budget We Aren’t Going to Get

There’s a federal budget coming later today.  I know, it’s hard to remember what one of those is like: it’s been 25 months and several hundred billion in unscheduled expenditures since we last had one.  As usual here at HESA Towers (well – virtual HESA Towers, or maybe HESA Towers-in-exile) will be bringing you analysis of what the budget means for post-secondary education.  But this morning, I thought I would give a sense of what I think is heading down

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April 19, 2021 No Comments

A Very Canadian Innovation Proposal

If you let any conversation about innovation policy go on long enough, the story of DARPA (the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA until 1972, and, weirdly, between 1993 and 1996) will likely come up, usually in a form so tortured that it is unrecognizable from the real thing.  This matters because the Business Council of Canada has just backed the idea of a Canadian DARPA as a solution to the country’s innovation woes.  This is, I think, a bad idea,

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March 3, 2021 1 Comment

Getting A Head Start on the Next Tech Panic

One of the things that makes the “tech” industry in Canada is that it is basically not a tech industry at all.  If you look at the major publicly-traded companies in Canada which could reasonably be described as “tech”, what you see is mostly a collection of e-commerce platforms plus some enterprise software companies.  We have a few equipment makers (Sierra Wireless, Evertz, Photon) whose annual revenues combined are smaller than York University’s budget.  And there’s Ballard, which is in

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January 12, 2021 No Comments

Arresting Decline

As I noted yesterday, the Canadian post-secondary sector seems to be in a deep public funding rut. We’re in the 12th year of flat budgets, and no political party – whether in government or opposition – seems inclined to reverse this.  What to do?   Well, in the strategic planning business, the first thing you look for are goals.  The second thing you look for are barriers to those goals.  So, let’s try that out by confronting why no government wants to

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October 22, 2020 3 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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