Inkless Wells

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He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

Naylor on the knowledge economy

by Paul Wells on Thursday, May 21, 2009 2:04pm - 20 Comments

David Naylor, the University of Toronto’s president, delivers a speech on research, innovation, and Canada’s business culture that’s eerily similar to a column I published last week. Drawing from some of the same sources I used, Naylor makes a few points that should simply become common currency among people who want to discuss how Canada can use ideas to improve its economic performance:

• The post-recession economy will have lower global growth potential than the pre-recession economy. So it’s important not to forgo potential productivity gains.

• Canada has a long history of forgoing potential productivity gains.

• It’s tempting to be complacent about our level of educational attainment. We have high post-secondary-education participation rates only because we have a lot of people in community colleges. Our university attendance is middle-of-the-OECD-pack and our grad-school attainment sucks.

• Science, engineering, technology and math aren’t the only useful disciplines of study. The humanities and business education are important too. Just ask Jim Balsillie.

• It’s important, not only to have broad-based research funding, but special incentives to attract leaders in their fields. In that regard, “Hat’s off on this score to the federal government for introducing 500 new Vanier Scholarships for doctoral students. Valued at $50,000 per year, and desiged to compete with Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, these top-tier awards for domestic and international graduate students send a very positive signal about Canada’s commitment to nurturing outstanding talent.”

• “We can and must get the three federal Granting Councils back on a modest growth trajectory” to insure all those shiny new taxpayer-funded labs are used to full capacity by the best investigators. But it’s business performance of R&D, not university research, where Canada seriously lags.

• The biggest challenge isn’t this or that program or institution, but a risk-averse culture that has to change.

Tags: David Naylor, research

More by Paul Wells

Steve M

So, quick question, how many SHERC and NSERC grants in the past 10 years have been rejected that have proposed studying why the business community in Canada is risk-averse?

If few, why doesn’t the government provide a one-time pool of money to get such research going?
Canuckistanian

“Our university attendance is middle-of-the-OECD-pack and our grad-school attainment sucks.”

interesting that the study on how having a white name makes you far more likely to be interviewed than having a foreign-sounding name when applying for jobs also noted:

“Employers also didn’t value masters degrees from prestigious foreign universities.”

could it be a result of the fact canadian managers don’t have, for the most part, grad-level education? not that i’m bitter with my master’s degree from a prestigious foreign university or anything; but if the employers aren’t educated, will they look for employees who are better educated than they are? perhaps there are productivity gains to be achieved by employing better educated people…

Paul Wells

Thanks for your effete, elitist point, Canuckistanian. Or shall I call you…Canuckistatieff?!?!?!!!!

Canuckistanian

egads, i’ve been outed! hopefully my nationalistic pseudonym will cover up my latent cosmopolitanism ;-)

Steve M

Is the implication that managers from other countries do, and if they do then they are better able to recognize these foreign institutions? I work in academia in the US, and we have a hard problem recognizing applicants from some top schools in foreign countries, because we simply don’t know what they are. This is specifically true in countries that are massively changing their educational infrastructure, like China and India. Also, I would point out that many top Canadian schools do not have the reputation out of the country that they deserve, at least in my opinion. I’m not sure how this can be fixed, but it is worth thinking about.

Canuckistanian

all good points. my point was in reference to a recent study that found canadian management to have far lower levels of educational attainment than their american counterparts.

oompus boompus

“The post-recession economy will have lower global growth potential than the pre-recession economy. So it’s important not to forgo potential productivity gains.”

The reason why you’re having a recession, or depression, is because of heavy socialist intervention leading to financial and entrepreneurial chaos and bankruptcy, followed by even heavier intervention in a deluded attempt to fix the problems caused by the previous interventions.

If you’re trying to say that the way to restore productivity is to ratchet up the intervention even further by funding an even bigger socialist education system, you’re dreaming.

The USSR and all of its puppet states utterly collapsed, and it sure as heck wasn’t because of a lack of educational attainment or a lack of state investment in schools or research. They collapsed because socialist intervention crushes innovation, independence, entrepreneurship and even rational thought and actions. It turns out that slaves and drones don’t produce very good scholarship or business ideas. Whoda thunk?

Jim

So it was the socialist policies of the US banking and mortgage money markets that got us into this recession? Fact is, no one – of any political bent – knows how to climb out of an economic depression. The interventions are not enacted out of political ideology – rather because the public demands their politicians do “something/anything”. So perhaps the Harper government’s frustration with the pace at which our civil service is rolling out the stimulus cash is perhaps misplaced?

P.S. Naylor’s speech was made on May 14th. Paul’s was published on May 15th….. ;-)
TJ Cook

“The reason why you’re having a recession, or depression, is because of heavy socialist intervention leading to financial and entrepreneurial chaos and bankruptcy…”

Here in reality, the subprime mortgage crisis was caused by LACK of enforcement of existing financial regulations (among other things). The one thing truly missing was government intervention.

Nice fantasy you’re having there. Sorry to interrupt.

sophiageffros14

Science, engineering, technology and math aren’t the only useful disciplines of study. The humanities and business education are important too. Just ask Jim Balsillie.
That’s not what high-school students are told.
Basically, or so the story goes, if you study International Development or History or French or English or Political Science or Journalism you will die alone. Or live in a cardboard box. Possibly both.
Ah, studying science through the fear of dying alone… ’tis a beautiful thing.

http://www.maple-leaf-forever.com Lord Bob

I would argue that, if you’re living in a cardboard box, dying alone is better than having to share the cardboard box.

TJ Cook

“The humanities and business education are important too. Just ask Jim Balsillie.”

Followed later by: “Hat’s off on this score to the federal government for introducing 500 new Vanier Scholarships for doctoral students.”

I’m sure he meant ‘Hats off’, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be bashing my grammar nerd head against my keyboard.
http://dredtory.blogspot.com/ Sir Francis

I’m sure he meant ‘Hats off’…

“Hat’s off” can work grammatically, as long as we understand it to mean “[My] hat is off” to whomever is being lauded–a bit of a stretch, admittedly.

Mr. Wells rightly points to Canada’s risk-averse nature, but he, like many others, fails to mention a deeper cultural problem–the fact that our society is endemically intellect-averse.

The effects of North America’s genetic anti-intellectualism have been palliated by massive immigration, which for decades has imported millions of high-achieving mathematicians, engineers and scientists who do much of our intellectual heavy lifting while the descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims and the Loyalists satisfy themselves with clerical and managerial mediocrity. Look at the surnames on Ontario Scholar and Dean’s lists to see what I mean.

Changing our thinking- , reading-, and research-averse ways will be much more difficult than changing our risk-averse nature, but the former is a precondition of the latter.
http://worthwhile.typepad.com Stephen Gordon

The thing is: it’s awfully hard to see what all this means in terms of policy. Worse, there’s the serious risk of public money being directed to media- and politics-savvy entrepreneurs whose business plan amounts to figuring out how to plausibly claim that promoting a ‘knowledge economy’ involves giving them money.

Especially if they live in a swing riding.

And an election is near.

Dot

Seminole argument.

http://worthwhile.typepad.com Stephen Gordon

A google search of “seminole argument” yields nothing. Care to elaborate?

Canuckistanian

hey, be nice to richard florida ;-)

Myron A

In the late 90′s, my alma mater, Purdue University, developed Purdue Research Park–an intentional network of businesses in about 5-6 key knowledge-economy sectors. As I understand it, the university research foundation offered infrastructure and support in order to attract entrepreneurs and investors to (a) apply the patented technologies/ideas (as well as others) being developed through pure research at the university, and (b) thereby spurring economic growth in the state. If last week’s column and Naylor’s address are correct, then it seems that this is exactly the kind of thing needed to link research to innovation. Here’s the link:

http://www.purdueresearchpark.com/index.asp

Steve M

Purdue’s research park is a great example, and it is starting to do wonderful things, but the University of Calgary also has a research park, and it has not done much in my opinion other than to support companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt years ago. So, it would appear the devil is in the details. I don’t profess to know why one is apparently working and the other is not.

I will say that I do think that entrepreneurial spirit is stronger in some aspects of Canada then others (I know, how very uncanadian of me to say). This may just be perception, but I would be interested in seeing numbers. I also have in mind entrepreneurship that leads to world-class companies, and not mom-and-pop diners, so it would perhaps be a hard thing to measure.

Mulletaur

“The biggest challenge isn’t this or that program or institution, but a risk-averse culture that has to change.”

Why would anybody dare to be excellent in Canada when some Conservative politician is likely to come along and kill the project just like they did with the Avro Arrow ?