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Category: Policy

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

Consulting

The issue of how governments use consultants is now centre-stage, thanks to Pierre Poilievre and the National Post deciding to go full Maude Barlow on the issue of federal government contracts with McKinsey & Company.  Chatter on twitter suggests that left and right are able to come together around two key issues: first, that having consultants do work means that government is somehow no longer accountable to the public  and second, plaintively asking “why do we need consultants, when public servants

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January 17, 2023 1 Comment

Stacking and Micro-credentials

Just a short one today, on micro-credentials. In theory, micro-credentials can serve one of two purposes.  One is that they can be used as bespoke workforce-oriented training to fill very specific/niche labour market ends; the other is that they can be used – like credits – to stack towards large credentials such as diplomas, master’s degrees, and others.  If you draw up the policy framework for micro-credentials in the right way, they can achieve either or both of these goals

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November 16, 2022 3 Comments

Viewpoint Diversity

Last week, the MacDonald-Laurier Institute released a truly bad paper on “viewpoint diversity” at Canadian Universities.  How bad was it, you ask?  Really bad.  Icelandic rotting shark bad.  Crystal Pepsi bad.  Final Season of Game of Thrones bad.  The basic thrust of the paper, co-written by Christopher Dummitt and Zachary Patterson, is that The Canadian professoriate is well to the left of the Canadian public Within the academy, those who describe themselves as being on the right are much more

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September 22, 2022 2 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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