Where you need to go in this town for a good idea

By Paul Wells - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 5:58 PM - 0 Comments

Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.

My very strong hunch is that Canadian industry doesn’t need more help so much as it needs to be made to worry, through a set of policies designed to expose Canada more directly to global competition. So I like this quote from John Manley in David’s column: “Quite frankly, if there is an innovation problem in Canada, that’s the responsibility of the management and boards of directors here in Canada.” I’m really pleased to see that UofT president David Naylor is on Goodyear’s panel; he’s good at the kind of blunt talk that will be needed.

There’s another guy on the panel who will not be familiar to just about anybody, but should be. His name is Arvind Gupta, he runs an organization called MITACS, and I’ve had a story about him ready to run for the past couple of weeks in one of our upcoming university issues. We’ve plucked that story out of our queue so you can read about Gupta now. Here it is after the jump. Continue…

Metablog: Adding to Wells on Ivison on Naylor

By Andrew Potter - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:55 PM - 4 Comments

Colleague Wells points us to what I agree is a very good piece by Ivison on David Naylor’s visit to Ottawa. Toward the end of his column, Ivison references a piece on the recession and higher education, written by Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn of the Educational Policy Institute.

Alex has a piece in the recent 50th anniversary issue of University Affairs, which looks at the main trends driving higher education in Canada (and the world) right now; the article is one of those science-fictiony things where Alex writes as if it is 2034 and he’s looking back at how current trends played out over the next few decades. It’s all pretty smart, but here’s what I think is the part most relevant to Naylor’s agenda:

Institutional mistrust of government, and mutual mistrust between the federal and provincial levels of government, had stymied the development of a national quality-assurance system. And sheer inertia had stalled any changes to credit definitions or adoption of a European-style process for common degree outcomes across institutions.

Moreover, few Canadian institutions had made serious investments in a presence abroad (let alone set up campuses) and almost none had experience in promoting themselves abroad in a way that could challenge the American, British and Australian universities that dominated the market. So, what many universities had thought of as their “Plan B” in the event of government cutbacks – foreign student recruitment – turned out not to be viable.

Here’s the full article.

A columnist writes about education and the knowledge economy

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 3:45 PM - 23 Comments

And it isn’t me! Or Jeff Simpson! No, it’s colleague John Ivison, who does a bang-up job of summarizing the conversation that ensued when UofT president David Naylor came to Ottawa last week, where he ran into freelance provocateur Alex Himelfarb. The topic was brains and money. Ivison’s column is worth your attention.

Naylor on the knowledge economy

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 2:04 PM - 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.