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Category: Innovation

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

Really? You Think? (PBO’s Supercluster Critique)

On Tuesday, the Parliamentary Budget Office released a sharply critical paper concerning the federal government’s Superclusters project, basically saying, that a) the projects are behind schedule and b) most of the numbers used to justify the project in terms of net benefits and new jobs were utter nonsense. It’s actually not that interesting a report.  Once you take out the executive summary and the references it’s six pages long with a lot of white space.  The broad strokes of the criticism are nothing new

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October 8, 2020 1 Comment

Fall 2020 International Round Up: Qatar

Some of the world’s most fantastical higher education systems are in the countries that make up Gulf Co-operation Council, or GCC.  Among them, no system is more unique than Qatar’s.  And over the last few years, it has been on an ever-stranger course. Qatar is one of those tiny gulf emirates that entered the modern world under treaty protection of the British Empire.  Along with Bahrain, Qatar chose to remain independent rather than join the United Arab Emirates in 1971,

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September 22, 2020 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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