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Tag: Basic Research

CARPA vs Tekes/IIA.

As noted back in our budget commentary, the Government of Canada seems to have abandoned the idea of a Canadian Advanced Research Projects Agency (CARPA – see here, here and here for previous takes on this) in favour of a yet-to-be-named innovation-and-investment agency said to be based on the Finnish agency Tekes and the Israel Innovation Authority.   A number of people have asked me to explain what the difference is between the two.  As always, I am here to oblige:

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April 12, 2022 No Comments

Balanced Budgets

A few weeks ago, the federal and länder governments in Germany reached a ten-year accord with respect to funding for scientific research.  Result: a decade of planned 3% annual increases.  Needless to say, this elicited quite a few envious glances from folks in Canada, who only get funding increases in jerky fashion, often after years of neglect.   Partly, this was a product of Germany’s more healthy system of science federalism, where different levels of government talk to each other like grown ups instead of

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May 28, 2019 No Comments

Excellence vs Progress

Earlier this week, I was in Moscow at a session talking about (among other things) national excellence programs, making the point that there aren’t really that many examples of successful ones.  One of the university rectors in the audience then asked me the following question (I apologize for paraphrasing a bit here because I don’t remember the exact wording): “look, the real problem in science is that we are spinning our wheels, not making any great discoveries.  Instead, all we

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March 21, 2019 No Comments

Organizing Science

I’m on my way to Moscow today.  It’s become one of my favourite destinations not only because I can walk around and pretend I am in my favourite novels (I highly recommend an early morning stroll to the Patriarch Ponds and then sit on one of the benches to read the opening chapter of The Master and Margarita) but also because Russia in general holds a mirror up to the west and makes you question the “normal” order of things. 

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March 18, 2019 1 Comment

History of PSE in Canada Part VII – The here and now (since 2003).

The current era of PSE in Canada essentially took shape at the end of the Chretien Era.  There has been a little bit of evolution in institutional forms (this is the era in which “polytechnics” arrive and applied research becomes a thing at the college level, and several colleges were converted into universities) but really no change in system architecture. There are certainly budget changes – rapidly increasing in the period to about 2009, and then levelling off with international student

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October 25, 2018 1 Comment

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