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Category: Innovation

Non-existent Preconditions for DARPA Success

The federal government is taking its sweet time being sworn in (apparently the GG is on holiday in Germany or something), so it’ll be another week or so before we get new ministers and new mandate letters.  These letters set ministers’ priorities in a more formal way than manifesto commitments.  My absolute dearest wish, when it comes to Science and Innovation, is that these letters should read “you should take our mandate commitments seriously but not literally”.  That is, the

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October 13, 2021 1 Comment

2021 PSE Platforms – The Conservative Party

Alright, fam.  You know the drill.  It’s a federal election, so between now and September 20th, I’ll be looking at various party manifestos to see what they portend for our sector, and then finishing up with some comparative analysis.  I am not entirely sure how many parties I will do: I never do the Bloc for obvious reasons, so that leaves three and *maybe* a fourth if the Greens get their act together to release any policies and stop behaving

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September 1, 2021 1 Comment

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

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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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