Want results? Offer a prize

By Pierre Poilievre - Monday, March 18, 2013 at 2:21 PM - 0 Comments

It is easy to turn public money into research. But the question should be, “How do we turn research into results?” Who better to ask than Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google co-founder, Sergey Brin? They invented and popularized technologies that serve billions of people and have created mind-boggling wealth.

Last month, Zuckerberg and Brin inaugurated the “Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences” with the purpose of recognizing “excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” Rather than simply pumping all the money into research institutions, Zuckerberg and Brin are paying for results.

History proves they are onto something.

Napoleon Bonaparte offered a cash prize for new ways of preserving food, knowing that his “army marched on its stomach”. So Nicolas Francois Appert invented canned foods, and used the reward of 12,000 francs to open a commercial cannery, which operated for over a century.

Between 1839 and 1939, the Royal Agricultural Society of England offered cash prizes at annual competitions. A Harvard Business School and Norwegian School of Economics joint study showed “large effects of the prizes on competitive entry” and “an impact of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous patents”. The contests led to new milking machines, cream separators, cultivators, light portable motors and more than 15,000 other innovations that made food more plentiful and farming less burdensome.

In 1874, the Scientific American even said that the Royal Agricultural Society prizes catalyzed a “most extraordinary improvement in the engines, as regards economy and workmanship, and there is little doubt that the effect of these tests has been most beneficial to the users of steam power.” That is important because, as the report notes, steam power likely did more to boost output than any other invention of the latter part of the 19th century.

Almost a fifth of the inventions that competed became patented. Even the losing contestants won. Hundreds of them patented their inventions to profit from them.

From the soil to the sky: the “Lone Eagle”, Charles Lindbergh, won the $25,000 Orteig prize to become the first man to pilot a non-stop flight from New York to Paris, and the first to cross the Atlantic solo. According to the X Prize Foundation, “a quarter of all Americans personally saw Lindbergh and [his plane] Spirit of St. Louis within a year of his flight – and the world changed with their excitement”. The Foundation notes that in the year of his legendary flight, the number of licensed aircraft jumped 400 per cent and applications for pilot licenses rose 300 per cent. From 1926 to 1929, the number of airline passengers went from 5,782 to 173,405 – a 30-fold hike in just three years.

Based on this success, the Foundation is leading a revival of prize money for innovation. First, they offered $10 million for launching a private-sector aircraft carrying three people to outer space twice in two weeks. Twenty-six teams from a half-dozen countries competed and invested a total of $100 million on development. There was an astounding $10 in R&D chasing each dollar in prize money—talk about leverage.

The contest not only led to the invention of a new aircraft, but a new industry — private sector space travel. Virgin Galactic has purchased technology from the winning team for that very purpose.

The Foundation then offered a contest for fuel-efficient vehicles. A Swiss company won $2.5 million with a vehicle that could go zero-to-60 miles per hour in 6.6 seconds, while running on an amazing 200 miles-per-gallon equivalent. In other words, it accelerates almost as fast as a 2010 BMW 328i, with seven times the fuel efficiency of a 2010 Honda Civic.

The X Prizes have since expanded to robotic moon landings, genomics, environmental cleanup, education and global development.

The private sector is sponsoring prizes for more than philanthropy. A few years back, Netflix crowdsourced its R&D with a $1 million prize for a new system of algorithms to recommend films. According to The Economist, 55,000 people competed and the winning team was a group of seven who had worked together via the internet and met in person for the first time when they retrieved their prize.

Governments are catching on to the power of prizes. Under the America Competes Act, 45 U.S. government agencies have offered over 200 prizes to incentivize problem solving. The President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy says prizes are now a “standard tool in every Federal agency’s toolbox”. And this January, the New York City Schools Chancellor announced a $104,000 prize for the best app, video game or other technology to help teenagers conquer math.

Here in Canada, the House of Commons Transport Committee unanimously made the cost-neutral recommendation for government to “redirect a portion of its existing research and innovation budget away from institutions and towards substantial prize money for innovations which meet well-defined public goals.”

With private sector promotional sponsors picking up the tab, governments could hold massive science fairs to unveil the winners. The prestige and publicity would create further incentive to compete and win. As the Lindbergh flight and the Royal Agricultural Society prizes prove, the prestige and publicity of competitions can motivate the innovators of today and inspire those of tomorrow.

Let’s keep our eyes on that prize and make Canada an innovation nation.

Dell Inc. and the PC industry’s innovation crisis

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Tony Avelar/Getty Images

It’s a sure sign a company is in desperate straits when journalists go searching for answers from a former pitchman. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Ben Curtis, the actor who played the “Dell dude” in computer-maker Dell Inc.’s 2000-era commercials (in which he would inform strangers “Dude, you’re getting a Dell”), suggested his troubled former employer could get a sorely needed boost if his character were resurrected. “Since that campaign ended, Dell has lost their personality,” Curtis said, adding that he, too, now uses an Apple Inc.-made laptop.

Dell’s problems won’t be so easily fixed. In a bid to speed up a badly needed transition from hardware manufacturer to provider of high-margin software and services, founder and CEO Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners are proposing a massive $24.4-billion leveraged buyout of Round Rock, a Texas-based company that once held the title of the world’s largest maker of personal computers. It’s just another reminder of how fast the technology industry moves. One day a company is the most powerful in Silicon Valley, with a soaring stock price; the next it’s contemplating moving away from the very business that made it a household name. (In Dell’s case, its outstanding shares, once worth nearly $60, are being purchased by its founder and Silver Lake for $13.65 apiece.)

Although desktop and laptops remain ubiquitous in homes, offices and schools, sales of PCs have slumped in recent years as consumers increasingly use smartphones and tablets. Worldwide PC shipments totalled 90 million units during the last three months of 2012, according to Gartner Research, a 4.9 per cent decline from the same period a year earlier. In Canada, the fall was even steeper—down nearly 14 per cent. “We’re approaching a saturation point in the market,” says Tim Brunt, an analyst at consulting firm IDC Canada. “There are multiple PCs in every household. Everybody’s got one, so now it’s just about buying replacements.”

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Inventor James Dyson: ‘The path to discovery is full of mistakes’

By Jay Teitel - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 12:25 PM - 0 Comments

Toby Madden/eyevine/Redux

Recently I had lunch at my neighbourhood mall, and afterwards I retired to the food-court facilities to wash my hands. Done with rinsing, I looked, as is my wont, for the paper-towel dispenser. It wasn’t where it normally was. Nor was the air hand-dryer, of the standard useless type that had turned me into a paper-towel devotee in general. In place of both was a waist-high, pewter-coloured apparatus with a pair of scooped, hand-shaped cut-outs, bordered in canary-yellow plastic. Dyson Airblade, read the name on the machine. “Insert hands to dry. Raise and lower hands through airflow. Your hands will be dry in 12 seconds.” I inserted my hands, feeling like a bit of an idiot. The machine hummed on immediately; the air that assaulted me was like a blade, albeit a room-temperature blade, powerful and sharp, but pleasantly so. Hoping against hope, I counted to 12. I removed my hands.

They were dry.

My hands were dry. It was a miracle. Here was a hand-dryer that actually worked, and not only worked, but worked without using heat to evaporate the water on my hands; instead it scraped it off with 640 km/h blades of forced cool air, in the process saving 80 per cent in electrical costs and making the Airblade more environmentally sustainable and hygienic than hot air dryers or paper towels. It was enough to make me want to find the person responsible, and offer him my congratulations and gratitude. Continue…

Amanda Lang on how to get ahead in business

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, October 22, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

COLE GARSIDE

Amanda Lang, CBC’s senior business correspondent and the co-host of The Lang & O’Leary Exchange, knows a few things about reinvention. After originally setting out to become an architect, she ended up as a print journalist instead, and later made a successful leap to the small screen. Her new book, The Power of Why, examines the relationship between innovation and success, both in business and in people’s personal lives.

Q: Why a book on innovation? It doesn’t seem like that novel a topic.

A: Productivity—as I spend time persuading our national news desk—is not a boring subject. It is the key to our economic prosperity. And we’re failing miserably at it—it’s tragic. So for years now I’d been giving these speeches about productivity and afterwards people would come up and say, ‘Great, now you’ve scared us to death. But what can we do about it?’ And I didn’t have a response. So I started to dig into it and what I discovered is that there is an easy answer and it’s innovation. If we can find a way to spark more innovation we’ll get greater productivity.

Q: One of the things your book argues is that we tend to view innovation too narrowly. What’s your definition?

A: It’s not mine, it’s borrowed, but the best definition I’ve seen is an old idea meets a new idea and the outcome changes behaviour. The change in behaviour is critical to the whole thing. If you create something and it doesn’t have any external influence, it’s useless. But even very incremental innovation can change people radically.

Q: You talk about things like cost-efficiencies being innovations. Should that really count?

A. Yes. The beauty of the way businesses work is that they are endlessly innovative because there is a profit imperative. I just bought a new toaster and this morning I realized it has a timer on it. Think about it. When you are waiting for your toast, the wait seems interminable. You have no idea how long it’s going to take. It’s frustrating. Now if I move the dial to four I know it’s going to take 45 seconds, and if I move it to six, that it’s going to take a minute. It’s that kind of incremental innovation that businesses do to keep us buying products, but that also make our lives better.

Q: There are a lot of fun sketches of innovators in your book, but almost all of the people you describe are Americans, or Americans who work in Canada. Are you telling us that you think that Canadians aren’t that good at innovation?

A: I don’t think Canadians have given themselves permission to innovate the way Americans do. Do I think there’s something cultural in Canada that inhibits us? Yes, 100 per cent. The very traits that we hold dear—our politeness, our collaborative tendencies, our unwillingness to let people fail badly—are all things that inhibit innovation. But one of the things that I discovered—and I hope it’s clear in the book—is that anybody can reawaken their own innovative instincts. So it’s not that Canadians can’t do it, it’s just that we may be less likely to do it than some other cultures.

Q: Do you think that has something to do with our country’s founding cultures?

A: That’s way beyond my area of expertise. But I was talking about this to a group of executives, and three Americans who moved up to Canada said it was like cold water being dashed on them. One talked about how his kid came home from school with a “Canadian A,” it was 82 per cent, but in the U.S. that’s a B+. Another one coaches basketball and spoke about how when a kid is at the free-throw line, the whole gym goes quiet. Unlike in the U.S., where the other team’s supporters are going nuts, trying to throw him off. And the other told me how a meeting that requires four people draws 12 in Canada. And everyone wants to agree: it’s all yes, and no buts. That feels good, but it doesn’t work.

Q: You’ve identified the school system as being one of the barriers to innovation. Is that a uniquely Canadian problem?

A: No, it isn’t. When you think about it, everybody’s system was designed for the industrial age and it’s still really geared around these outcomes, whether it’s standardized testing or core subjects. We’ve ignored the fact that textbooks aren’t scarce anymore, information isn’t scarce anymore. There’s no reason why the teacher has to have all the answers and give them to the kids. The challenge is, how do we create people who know how to think, rather than people who have learned what you want them to learn?

Q: There are still an awful lot of people who are in jobs where their performance is rated on how well they follow procedures. So why is it necessary that they become innovative?

A: One of the things I discovered—to my horror—is the way we’ve become disengaged. They’ve done global studies that suggest 62 per cent of us are just showing up for a paycheque. And we all know intuitively that it feels better when your brain is turned on, and you’re focused. If you allow yourself to actually connect with your work, you will find ways to innovate. But there’s another aspect. Organizational behavioural theorists believe that increasingly, no matter what your job is, you are going to be tasked with complex problems. So if we’re not actually training people to absorb and process information in a way to meet that challenge, then we’re creating a whole group of people who are in another class. Not just socio-economically, but mentally, too.

Q: In the book, you cite examples of companies like GM or Microsoft, or one could even argue Apple now, who are no longer quite so innovative. Why is it so hard for companies to remain inventive?

A: The status quo bias is the biggest threat to a successful company—and it’s arguably what happened to Research In Motion. Companies get to a point where they have all this money and pride tied up in a product and they can’t afford—psychologically, mentally—to stop coddling it. The pace of a product cycle now is so fast, that if you do that for weeks, not even months, someone else has come out and replaced you in the marketplace.

Q: Walter Issacson’s recent biography of Steve Jobs painted him as a very difficult person. Does innovation at a corporate level require a chief jerk?

A: No, but it does require permission up the chain. If what you want is everybody in an organization being innovative together, you need buy-in from the top. The biggest impediments to innovation are structures—IT, HR. Anyone who can say no to where the money goes is most likely to put a stop to that sort of creative process.

Q: But isn’t there a confrontational aspect to getting innovation started and keeping it flowing?

A: There doesn’t have to be. It’s more important to agree that failure is part of the process. In some organizations the very structure of compensation affects innovation because if you fail your bonus is cut. That’s really easy to fix. Don’t tie people’s compensation to risk because that keeps them in a little box. And on a personal level, give people permission to fail—say it’s okay to have a bad idea sometimes.

Q: You also argue that these principles have an application in people’s personal lives. How?

A: I think these lessons can be super powerful. You can absolutely apply business theory to your relationships. How often do we think, ‘What does this person want from me, and what am I delivering?’ We just sort of let people drift around us in our orbit. To me, the same way we can engage better with people at work, we can engage better with the people in our lives.

Q: You end the book with a series of myths about innovation. What’s the most pervasive one?

A: The idea that not everybody can innovate, that you are somehow born to it. There are visionaries, just like there are great artists or athletes. But most people are incremental innovators. And if there’s a message I want people to take from this book it’s that there is a spectrum and you are on it somewhere.

Apple v. Samsung: Why the patent war risks creating a tech monster

By Jesse Brown - Monday, August 27, 2012 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments

1979 sketch of the Digital Audio Player by British Investor Kane Kramer. Photo: Steve Nicholson

It took jurors three days to decide what an eight year old could have told you in seconds: Samsung copied Apple. Look at an iPhone, then look at a Galaxy. It’s obvious. But so what?

Though Apple was quick to describe the decision as a victory for its core values of “originality” and “innovation,” let’s remember some of the real values Apple is built upon. Steve Jobs, who once quoted (stole?) Picasso’s line about great artists stealing, was himself a wonderfully original thief. All of Apple’s innovations are slick remixes of pre-existing ideas, from the graphic user interface Jobs lifted from Xerox (which Bill Gates later copied from him) to the iPod, which Apple has acknowledged was basically invented by this British guy in 1979. Technology, like all of human culture, progresses bit by bit as we build on each other’s work. Patents are a regulatory system imposed on technology, intended to make sure that inventors get paid for inventing. But they didn’t work out for the British dude who invented the digital audio player, and they aren’t working now.

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Flaherty tables a cautious budget, casts ahead to next steps

By John Geddes - Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

Back in 2006, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty began his first budget speech by reflecting on how “budgets say something about your motivations and your goals.” Having spoken that truism, Flaherty launched straight into announcing “tax relief people can see,” meaning mainly, of course, the first of the Tories’ two one-point cuts to the GST. Motivation and goal: lay the populist groundwork for turning Stephen Harper’s minority into a majority.

Three years later, Flaherty tabled his 2009 budget during the global recession brought on by the previous fall’s financial markets meltdown. “We must do what it takes,” he said, “to keep our economy moving and to protect Canadians in this extraordinary time.” He meant a deficit-fueled stimulus-spending spree. Motivation and goal: ease the pain of a downturn so punishing that it might, come the next election, land the Conservatives back in opposition.

The budget Flaherty unveiled today is neither the hopeful blueprint of a freshly minted government nor the defensive playbook of one facing a crisis. Given the Conservatives’ experience in power, and the lack of immediate threats facing them, a calmer, bolder plan might have been expected. Yet Budget 2012 is curiously tentative. Where potentially big measures are sketched—on funding cutting-edge companies, reforming immigration, or streamlining resource-project reviews—details remain frustratingly fuzzy.

Flaherty’s most telling line today was not about what he plans to do, but what he doesn’t have to. “We have no need,” he said, “to undertake the radical austerity measures imposed by the federal government in the 1990s.”

That tone of palpable relief runs through the budget. The much-discussed review of program spending, for instance, found just $5 billion in annual spending to cut from 26 departments and agencies. Flaherty is right—that’s hardly “radical austerity,” considering Ottawa’s total program expenses 2012-13 will be $245.3 billion.

Modest as it is, though, the restraint underscores a bedrock Conservative preference. As a share of gross domestic product, direct federal spending is projected to slide from 6.5 per cent in 2012-13 to 5.5 per cent in 2016-17. Note that during the same stretch Ottawa’s transfers to individuals and the provinces are slated to hold steady.

So the budget plots a course for a federal government whose own programs shrink a bit, while it keeps contributing about the same amount, as a share of the economy, for things like health care and seniors’ pensions.

Had you heard otherwise? In fact, Flaherty’s policy on curbing the growth in health transfers is calibrated to allow those payments to keep pace with economic growth. As for pensions, he has put off any pain for many years, announcing that the age of eligibility for Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement benefits will rise from 65 to 67 only gradually and not until 2023 to 2029.

With the Conservatives moving gingerly to limit Ottawa’s direct spending, while aiming to hold steady on transfers, anyone searching for signs of a more sharply defined small-c conservative bent might look to policies affecting business.

And the budget does include a much-anticipated general promise to speed up approval for oil, mining and forest-industry projects. It’s contingent, however, on the government negotiating with the provinces to introduce a “one-project, one-review” system. Details pending.

There’s also a pledge to put $400 million into venture capital for innovative firms that show promise as future “global leaders.” But exactly how Ottawa will pick those winners is put off with a promise that “in the coming months, the government will consider how to structure its support in order to incent private-sector investments.”

A pro-business immigration reform was also expected, but, yet again, the budget is vague, saying only that “in the future” the government will work with companies and the provinces to attract “a pool of skilled workers who are ready to begin employment in Canada.”

Any of these measures might turn out to be landmarks. Based on the budget itself, however, we just can’t be sure. Against the backdrop of smallish spending cuts, a holding-pattern policy on transfer payments, and no significant tax changes, the stay-tuned-for-details feel of the economic competitiveness package adds to the overall impression that the real news isn’t quite here yet.

Meanwhile, the once-daunting challenge of balancing the books again after the post-2009 deficits has been drained of drama. The federal fiscal situation has improved nicely in recent months, as the economic recovery continues, leaving Flaherty in a position to project, with room to spare, a slim deficit of $1.3 billion by 2014-15, and a surplus the following year. Some private forecasters now expect an end to federal red ink a year or two earlier.

The pressure, in other words, is off. Thinking back to Flaherty’s 2006 budget preamble, what motivations and goals shaped this one? A prime political motivation is surely to avoid risky controversy. An overarching policy goal to is keep the federal government about as big as it is now, while taking cautious steps toward bolstering the private-sector economic competitiveness.

After the populist feel of 2006, and the crisis-control urgency of 2009, the 2012 budget feels staid. Those who feared the Conservatives might adjust to their majority by imposing politically fearless measures early on will be breathing easier. Those who hoped to see that same fearlessness, though, will have to look ahead to all those next-steps, and to next year’s budget.

Click here for all the latest news and insight on the 2012 federal budget

Nash on innovation

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 1:54 PM - 0 Comments

Late last week, Peggy Nash detailed her innovation policy, including a new Canada Innovation Fund, targeted tax credits and expanded “ pre-commercial and commercial fiscal support” through a new Canada Development Bank. She recently talked to the Georgia Straight about the economy.

She characterized Harper’s economic policy as simply getting government out of the way so that corporations are free to do whatever they want—in the flawed hope that some benefits will trickle down to the rest of the country. “Well, we’ve got the highest level of inequality in Canada since the 1920s,” Nash noted. “But a big chunk of the wealth that’s being created—about a third of new wealth created before the downturn in 2008—went to the top one percent. That’s not good fiscal policy.”

Nash, a former negotiator with the Canadian Auto Workers union, said that she favours government working with business, labour, and communities “so we’re all pulling in the same direction to create good-quality jobs”. “Specifically, we shouldn’t just be shipping raw logs or raw materials or raw bitumen out of the country,” she declared. “What we should be doing is providing good stewardship of our raw materials and processing as many of those raw materials here in Canada as we can. That’s where the good jobs are; it’s where the innovation and technology are.”

Ms. Nash’s full economic policy paper is here.

Don’t we all need a cool alien sidekick?

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 6 Comments

Getty Images, iStock; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

Dear Scientists:

Many of you have chosen to devote your lives to preventing disease and curing illness. Enough with the selfishness already.

The time has come for you to join together, buckle down and deliver on the innovation that humanity really wants—namely, the kind we see in science fiction movies.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s great and everything that some of you are toiling to rid our planet of the scourge of malaria. But FYI, I still can’t order up a burrito supreme from a replicator and eat it in my hovercar.

Here are the things we’d like now, please.

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Watch our augmented reality demo

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 5:24 PM - 0 Comments

A grant dump that smothers innovation

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 12 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

For more than 30 years, people have been sounding the alarm at Canada’s disturbing decline in relative productivity, at our appalling lack of innovation, at a record of investment in R & D that can only be described as depraved. And for more than 30 years, governments have been doing something about it.

Have they ever. The federal government helps industry to innovate to the tune of $5 billion every year, delivered through more than 60 programs spread across 17 different agencies: the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), the Business Development Program (BDP), the Technology Demonstration Program (TDP), the Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative (SADI), the Automotive Innovation Fund (AIF), the Strategic Network Grants (SNG), the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR), the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE), the Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence (BL-NCE), the Centres for Strategic Research on Innovative Technology Networks (okay, I made that one up), on and acronymically on. And that’s just the feds. There are hundreds more innovation programs at the provincial level, and who knows how many others lurking among the nation’s municipalities and universities. The agricultural sector in Ontario alone requires no fewer than 45 such programs, courtesy of seven federal and provincial departments. All on top of the flagship federal tax incentive, the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit. Altogether, Canada is reckoned to provide among the most generous systems of R & D support in the world, behind only Spain and France.

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The life and times of Steve Jobs

By Chris Sorensen and Michael Friscolanti - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 4 Comments

John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images

Theo Gray was at the wheel of his car when he learned his friend Steve Jobs was dead. The call from his assistant came as a shock, not because Gray didn’t know of Jobs’s failing health—“I had some information about how bad he was”—but because it was difficult to comprehend a world without the legendary Apple co-founder. Jobs not only built one of the world’s most successful companies, with a market value of more than US$350 billion, but he elevated technology into the realm of the magical and gave us our first true glimpse of its potential. “I don’t know, maybe I was repressing the knowledge,” says Gray, who has known Jobs since 1988 and whose software company, Wolfram Research, has worked closely with Jobs and Apple for the past two decades. “I hoped maybe he would have another year or something.”

One more year. It boggles the mind to imagine what a digital dreamer like Jobs could do with 365 more days on this planet; the wonders he might conceive, or even the little annoyances of the mobile age he would inevitably solve. Jobs reshaped the world and how it communicates more in his 56 years than almost any other person of the last century.

It was why, moments after Apple Inc. confirmed Jobs’s death on Oct. 5, tributes began to pour in on sites like Facebook and Twitter, by the tens of millions. A few hours later, makeshift shrines popped up outside Apple stores throughout North America, Europe and Asia. President Barack Obama was moved to write: “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computers with Jobs in the 1970s, put it even more simply: “It’s like the world lost a John Lennon.”

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Canada’s knowledge economy: not so much

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 95 Comments

It’s always good to compare hope against achievement. One of the first big things the Harper government did after it had delivered on (four of) its five election-year priorities in 2006 was to release, in 2007, its Science and Technology Strategy. Our text today comes from that document — especially this paragraph, which came in its own little box to show how important it was:

“At a time when Canada’s overall productivity gains are below those of other trading nations with whom we compete, the need to encourage greater private-sector S&T investment is a national priority.”

Got it. And how’s that working out? Today Industry Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council released its second benchmarking report, two years after the first. This compares Canada’s performance on various research and innovation-related measures to global trends. And today’s report is pretty brutal. On the specific “national priority” I quoted above, here’s the tale of the tape:

“From 2006 to 2009…Canadian business expenditure on R&D declined in inflation-adjusted terms.”

But that’s just the beginning of it. As the Globe wrote this morning based on a leaked copy of the report (sigh), “Canada ranked worse or stagnated in 18 of 24 benchmarks tracked by the council since its 2008 report.” Here, through the magic of cut-and-paste, is what that looks like on paper:

There’s a second page of those down arrows in the report after this one. Continue…

Waiting for yesterday’s technology

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 45 Comments

Photo by Bonnier R&D

Picture this: you wake up to discover your baby has a weird rash. You log on to the Medicare website which connects you to an available physician via video chat. She checks your baby’s digitized health record, has a look at the rash, prescribes an ointment, and keeps you from burdening your pediatrician or the local E.R.

You then drive your other kid to school. You punch in the destination on your smartphone. A predictive GPS traffic database is pinged, which determines that though traffic is smooth now, it could soon get jammed up, based on 300 other drivers who just punched in similar destinations. This group is split up and directed to a dozen alternate routes, and congestion remains light.

While you drive, your kid finishes his homework on a tablet computer. It’s a French translation assignment, conducted in collaboration with a sister class in Paris that’s working on an English translation assignment. Your kid finishes the work, IM chats a bit with the French kid he was paired with, and then forgets the screen in your car. No biggie—the school will lend him a tablet for his classwork. They’re as cheap and ubiquitous as USB keys, and he can pull the finished homework assignment from the cloud.

You get to work and slack off a bit, checking out a song your friend just posted online. It’s a clever remix of a Beatles track. You send it to your car for the ride home, and an automatic payment of 99 cents is handled by your ISP—66 cents goes to your friend, 32 cents to Yoko and Paul et al., and a penny to your ISP, who dropped monthly access fees and now posts record profits by providing an insured and encrypted payment layer over the Web. You then quickly vote on a municipal bylaw through Facebook, and finally get to work.

So:

Is the above a techno-utopian dream of the future? A starry-eyed vision of what next year could be? No, it’s a description of what last year should have been. All of the technology described above has existed for years now. But we are being held back. Legacy industries, lazy governments, obsolete laws, and pokey bureaucracies are among the culprits.

Meanwhile, as technology itself becomes more open and inclusive, our conversation about it gets more geeky and insular. We obsess over industry horse-races—LCD vs LED, HDMI vs DVI, 3G vs HSPDA—and the relentless, ever-tightening cycle that starts at novelty and ends at obsolescence. We are addicted to the promise of the next gee-whiz invention.

But invention isn’t the issue; implementation is, and that’s what I’ll be focusing on in this space. I’ll be posting thoughts, opinions and stories about the worldwide push to upgrade to yesterday’s technology. I’ll be featuring news of those who refuse to wait and are working around the barriers.

Hell, I may even review a gadget.

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…

Peter Robertson vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 10:57 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Robertson

Why he’s famous: He’s the inventor of the Robertson screwdriver—you know, the square-shaped one in your toolbox.

Why he deserves to win: Before Robertson’s invention in 1908, we were stuck with the slip-prone flat bladed driver and slotted-head screw, a combo notorious for causing injuries. Later, when the cross-shaped Phillips screw and driver were invented, Consumer Reports magazine declared the Robertson superior because Phillips’ screws are easily stripped and degrade with wear. As writer Witold Rybcynski put it, “no matter how old, rusty, or painted over, a Robertson screw can always be unscrewed. [It’s] the biggest little invention of the 20th century.”

Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

Why they’re famous: Along with Best, a medical student he’d hired, Banting isolated insulin as the hormone which regulates the body’s blood sugar levels.

Why they deserve to win: After reading a paper that suggested diabetes may be caused by a lack of a hormone secreted by islets in the back of the pancreas, he devised a way to isolate the islets by tying off most of the pancreas with ligatures. In 1921, Frederick Banting hired Charles Best and the two removed a dog’s pancreas, which caused blood sugar levels to rise (mimicking diabetics) before injecting the islets back into the dog. The animal lived for several more months, proving they had isolated the blood-sugar regulating hormone insulin. By 1922, the pair were bringing comatose diabetics in Toronto back to life. Diabetics worldwide have lived more normal lives ever since.

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Norman Bethune vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 6:15 PM - 0 Comments

Norman Bethune

Why he’s famous: Bethune revolutionized battlefield medicine.

Why he deserves to win: During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune invented a mobile blood transfusion service which could collect blood from donors and deliver it wherever it was needed. His “mobile blood bank” is considered the greatest medical innovation from the war. Later, Bethune would take his battlefield medicine expertise to China, where he became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and taught his techniques to new doctors and nurses. Think of Bethune as the Canadian Florence Nightingale.

Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

Why they’re famous: Along with Best, a medical student he’d hired, Banting isolated insulin as the hormone which regulates the body’s blood sugar levels.

Why they deserve to win: After reading a paper that suggested diabetes may be caused by a lack of a hormone secreted by islets in the back of the pancreas, he devised a way to isolate the islets by tying off most of the pancreas with ligatures. In 1921, Frederick Banting hired Charles Best and the two removed a dog’s pancreas, which caused blood sugar levels to rise (mimicking diabetics) before injecting the islets back into the dog. The animal lived for several more months, proving they had isolated the blood-sugar regulating hormone insulin. By 1922, the pair were bringing comatose diabetics in Toronto back to life. Diabetics worldwide have lived more normal lives ever since.

Mike Lazaridis vs. Peter Robertson

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Mike Lazaridis vs. Peter Robertson

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 6:15 PM - 0 Comments

Mike Lazaridis

Why he’s famous: Putting e-mail on people’s cell phones via the BlackBerry.

Why he deserves to win: Along with co-CEO Jim Balsillie, Lazaridis has built Research in Motion into a tech powerhouse, putting Canada on the map in the wireless device business. Lazaridis has registered more than 30 patents and won dozens of awards for his innovations in software and wireless communications technology, including a 1999 Academy Award for RIM’s role in inventing a digital-barcode reader for film editing.

Peter Robertson

Why he’s famous: He’s the inventor of the Robertson screwdriver—you know, the square-shaped one in your toolbox.

Why he deserves to win: Before Robertson’s invention in 1908, we were stuck with the slip-prone flat bladed driver and slotted-head screw, a combo notorious for causing injuries. Later, when the cross-shaped Phillips screw and driver were invented, Consumer Reports magazine declared the Robertson superior because Phillips’ screws are easily stripped and degrade with wear. As writer Witold Rybcynski put it, “no matter how old, rusty, or painted over, a Robertson screw can always be unscrewed. [It’s] the biggest little invention of the 20th century.”

Norman Bethune vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

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Sir Sandford Fleming vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:18 AM - 0 Comments

Sir Sandford Fleming

Why he’s famous: Fleming got everyone working off the same clock with the introduction of standard time.

Why he deserves to win: Like Bell, Fleming was hardly a one-trick pony. After emigrating to Canada from Scotland at the age of 18, Fleming established the Royal Canadian Institute in 1849 and helped design Canada’s very first postage stamp in 1851. He was also a key supporter of the construction of a cross-Canada railway. But while his role in linking Canada’s coasts is impressive, putting the entire world in sync with standard time is even more so.

Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

Why they’re famous: Along with Best, a medical student he’d hired, Banting isolated insulin as the hormone which regulates the body’s blood sugar levels.

Why they deserve to win: After reading a paper that suggested diabetes may be caused by a lack of a hormone secreted by islets in the back of the pancreas, he devised a way to isolate the islets by tying off most of the pancreas with ligatures. In 1921, Frederick Banting hired Charles Best and the two removed a dog’s pancreas, which caused blood sugar levels to rise (mimicking diabetics) before injecting the islets back into the dog. The animal lived for several more months, proving they had isolated the blood-sugar regulating hormone insulin. By 1922, the pair were bringing comatose diabetics in Toronto back to life. Diabetics worldwide have lived more normal lives ever since.

Return to the bracket

Alexander Graham Bell vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Alexander Graham Bell

Why he’s famous: He invented the telephone. Duh.

Why he deserves to win: He also invented the metal detector, created an alphabet for the Mohawk language, contributed significantly to aeronautics, and was a founder of the National Geographic Society. A natural inventor, Bell created his first invention at age 12, a de-husking machine that he used to make his part-time flour-milling job easier. But really, what would the last 135 years be like without phones?

Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

Why they’re famous: Along with Best, a medical student he’d hired, Banting isolated insulin as the hormone which regulates the body’s blood sugar levels.

Why they deserve to win: After reading a paper that suggested diabetes may be caused by a lack of a hormone secreted by islets in the back of the pancreas, he devised a way to isolate the islets by tying off most of the pancreas with ligatures. In 1921, Frederick Banting hired Charles Best and the two removed a dog’s pancreas, which caused blood sugar levels to rise (mimicking diabetics) before injecting the islets back into the dog. The animal lived for several more months, proving they had isolated the blood-sugar regulating hormone insulin. By 1922, the pair were bringing comatose diabetics in Toronto back to life. Diabetics worldwide have lived more normal lives ever since.

Return to the bracket

Marshall McLuhan vs. Peter Robertson

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Marshall McLuhan

Why he’s famous: Most of all, for his famously misunderstood phrase, “the medium is the message.”

Why he deserves to win: As the the father of modern mass media theory and an early philosopher of the electronic age, McLuhan changed the way people relate to information. Best known for coining the expressions “global village” and “the medium is the message” (which meant that the way we acquire information shapes us more than the information itself), his two major books—The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media—still have a cult following. Though he died before the advent of the Internet, McLuhan seemed to see it coming: he theorized electronic media was creating a global village by exposing people to events on the opposite side of the world which would render books obsolete. Ask Barnes and Noble if he was right.

Peter Robertson

Why he’s famous: He’s the inventor of the Robertson screwdriver—you know, the square-shaped one in your toolbox.

Why he deserves to win: Before Robertson’s invention in 1908, we were stuck with the slip-prone flat bladed driver and slotted-head screw, a combo notorious for causing injuries. Later, when the cross-shaped Phillips screw and driver were invented, Consumer Reports magazine declared the Robertson superior because Phillips’ screws are easily stripped and degrade with wear. As writer Witold Rybcynski put it, “no matter how old, rusty, or painted over, a Robertson screw can always be unscrewed. [It’s] the biggest little invention of the 20th century.”

Next: Guy Laliberté vs. Norman Bethune

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Guy Laliberté vs. Norman Bethune

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Guy Laliberté

Why he’s famous: For making the circus cool with the Cirque du Soleil

Why he deserves to win: Laliberté didn’t just take out the goofy animal stunts from the circus when he decided to class up the tent a little. He brought in a focus on character-driven narrative to replace them, effectively hybridizing the circus with theatre and opera. Thanks to him, acrobats no longer have to fear being mauled by a lion or bear while on the job.

Norman Bethune

Why he’s famous: Bethune revolutionized battlefield medicine.

Why he deserves to win: During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune invented a mobile blood transfusion service which could collect blood from donors and deliver it wherever it was needed. His “mobile blood bank” is considered the greatest medical innovation from the war. Later, Bethune would take his battlefield medicine expertise to China, where he became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and taught his techniques to new doctors and nurses. Think of Bethune as the Canadian Florence Nightingale.

Next: Alexander Graham Bell vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

Return to the bracket

James Naismith vs. Mike Lazaridis

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

James Naismith

Why he’s famous: You have heard of basketball, right?

Why he deserves to win: Naismith is widely credited as the inventor of basketball, which he reportedly developed while working as a phys-ed instructor at his local YMCA in Massachusetts. Naismith needed a sport to keep his otherwise unruly charges happy, but didn’t want to indulge their more boisterous tendencies. Soon enough, inspired by a childhood game bearing the unfortunate name of “duck-on-a-rock,” Naismith had them tossing a soccer ball at a peach basket placed at the top of a 10-foot pole. So we have Naismith to thank not just for giving non-hockey players something to do in the winter, but also for the social relevance of Shaq’s Twitter feed.

Mike Lazaridis

Why he’s famous: Putting e-mail on people’s cell phones via the BlackBerry.

Why he deserves to win: Along with co-CEO Jim Balsillie, Lazaridis has built Research in Motion into a tech powerhouse, putting Canada on the map in the wireless device business. Lazaridis has registered more than 30 patents and won dozens of awards for his innovations in software and wireless communications technology, including a 1999 Academy Award for RIM’s role in inventing a digital-barcode reader for film editing.

Next: Marshall McLuhan vs. Peter Robertson

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Let us now celebrate the losers

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images/ iStock/ Illustration by Taylor Shute

As humans, we come up with a lot of ideas. Most of them are terrible. Just ask the people who listen to pitches all day, like venture capitalists or bigwigs who run movie studios. Or any of the countless people throughout history who have come up with the idea of marrying Larry King.

But we keep devising new ideas because we want to progress as a civilization and achieve our potential, and also because we’re tired of vacuuming and couldn’t maybe a robot do that?
The result is an era of relentless innovation. New products seem to appear every day—and many of these gadgets are terrific. For instance, recent advances in smartphone technology have in just a few short years rendered obsolete a number of antiquated relics, such as the Yellow Pages and basic human courtesy.

Continue…

The method man

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Roman Cho; Getty Images/ Maragret Marissen

Sometimes Daniel Lanois feels like he’s being held hostage by the ghosts in his head. The brittle hi-hat in Arthur Alexander’s Anna—a soul ballad that peaked at No. 68 on the pop charts in 1962, and is mostly remembered for the cover version the Beatles did the following year. The warbling acoustic guitar of Blind Willie Johnson, a Texas bluesman and street preacher who died in 1945, leaving behind 30 songs and just one photograph. The “multidimensional” quality of old John Lee Hooker cuts: parched vocals up front, the bright tremolo and reverb of the guitar soaring above, and way out to one side, shoe leather scuffing against the studio floor. Sonic building blocks from the past that rattle around the super-producer and musician’s brain, waiting to burst back out in new finery, stretched, tweaked, or sometimes distorted beyond all recognition.

It’s part and parcel of his relentless search for sounds that will elevate a recording from workaday to timeless. The seven-time Grammy winner has a lot of pet terms for the process—a mixture of sacking and sleuthing. Over the years, he’s called it “testimonial exorcism,” “spotting,” and “highly paid vandalism.” But the one that seems to fit the best is Soul Mining, the title of his forthcoming musical memoir. “If you’re trying to solve a riddle, or do something that hasn’t been done before, you’re going to be at it for awhile because it requires a lot of research,” the 59-year-old drawls down the line from Bella Vista, his hilltop villa overlooking L.A.’s Silver Lake reservoir. “You bump into things you don’t like, then you discard them. But oftentimes those by-products are more interesting than what you thought you were going after in the first place. It takes a lot of time.”

Continue…