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Category: Research

Learning from the Airline Industry

Every once in awhile it’s worth looking at other industries to see what you can learn from them and apply it to your own. In the case of higher education, I think it is time to look at airlines. The obvious similarity here has to do with the difficulties both experience in branding. Airlines all deliver essentially the same experience – you get to the airport, go through security, pick a seat on one flying cigar tube and a few hours later

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November 14, 2011 1 Comment

What is Research, Anyway?

As we’ve seen repeatedly over the past few weeks, there’s a constituency out there that wants to see greater differentiation of institutions in terms of research-intensiveness. In the vernacular, this comes across as advocating “teaching institutions” to complement “research institutions,” something which occasionally gets incorporated into government policy as it did in British Columbia vis-à-vis the new universities. This kind of talk, of course, makes much of the professoriate go bananas. And they fire back with good stuff like Stephen

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October 20, 2011 2 Comments

Ducking the Issue

Man, did last week’s Globe editorial on reforming higher education get the bien pensants’ knickers in a knot, or what? Constance Adamson of OCUFA took the predictable “everything would be fine if only there was more money” line. Over at Maclean’s, Todd Pettigrew made a passionate defence of research and teaching being inextricably entwined, largely echoing a piece from the previous week by McGill’s Stephen Saideman, who argued that universities aren’t teaching vs. research but teaching and research. Methinks some

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October 19, 2011 1 Comment

Well, That Was Interesting

The Report of the Expert Panel on R&D, that is. It’s an intriguing and well-written piece of work (kudos to Peter Nicholson), at least as much for what it doesn’t say as what it does. There are three things this report does extremely well: i) it explains the mind-boggling number of tiny programs the federal government supports, ii) it graphically shows how the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program massively overshadows all other panels combined and iiI), it amusingly tells

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October 18, 2011 No Comments

The Future of Canadian R&D – Round One

The Mowat Institute showed some canny timing by releasing its paper, Canada’s Innovation Underperformance: Whose Policy Problem Is It?, on the Friday before the federal government’s Research and Development Review Panel reports. It was a real master-class in media management. The report, authored by Tijs Creutzberg, doesn’t break a lot of new ground; in many ways it’s just a lit review, albeit a very nicely-written one. Basically, it argues two things: i) that our government innovation strategies are overly biased

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October 17, 2011 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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