Open access publishing

A story from Saturday on open access publishing takes a look at the high cost of academic journal subscriptions and the open access publishing movement that has risen in recent years. Ironically, the story is not freely available from the online Globe and Mail unless you Google the title ("Turning the ivory tower into an open book").

The article quotes John Willinsky, who leads the Public Knowledge Project, as saying that academics have a responsibility to ensure their work is published and made accessible: "We have to change that thinking so that it is not enough to publish, you also are responsible for the degree of access to your work."

The Public Knowledge Project produces Open Journal Systems software that makes it simple for journal editors to set up and manage an online, open access journal. Open Conference Systems is a similar technology for conferences. Software systems such as these are important components of making information and knowledge media available to those who fund us: the public.

Another open source software that I like is D-Space. A colleague at the University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center gave me the great idea of using D-Space to archive conference posters and presentations, ephemeral media that are otherwise not accessible after the event. (How many of us have old conference posters rolled up in our offices?). Putting them online with D-Space gives them a permanent URI and makes them accessible in a useful and useable format. I started experimenting with this while at the UofT. We plan on installing a D-Space application in the near future as a means of archiving our knowledge media products and research outputs.

For those interested in open source software, Seneca's School of Computer Studies is hosting their annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium from 25-26 October this year. Check out also KMDI's Project Open Source Open Access.

Open source learning

Are open source and open access commensurate with the protection of intellectual property?

The previous post on the memetics of innovation alludes to the cross-pollination of ideas that can come with the conflation of ideas that cross boundaries. Collaborating to compete picks up on recent press on transparency and access to corporate trade secrets. The current running through both these issues is this: the creative tension arising from making ideas freely available and protecting intellectual property is useful for understanding and promoting applied research.

Open source learning, which I have elsewhere described as “the theory of knowledge sharing and production in both formal and informal settings . . . typifies how the free availability of information and the sharing of knowledge can benefit communities that cooperate towards common goals.” Innovation and invention do not occur in a vacuum, but rather happen in fits and starts, with each idea building on the one preceding. The principles of open source and open access offer us a way to release information (products, services) into public discussion in order to advance our collective understanding, and so development (be this technical or social). Memes and viral advertising are examples of how things get picked up; mashups using the Google maps API are one example of how the release of proprietary systems (with “some rights reserved”) can spur innovation while retaining some rights to intellectual property.

The lone inventor working in his basement, waiting to reveal his precious invention to the world, will emerge to find that this world has passed him by. Putting ideas into circulation gives them currency. We can retain rights to our intellectual property and build systems (in this sense technical) that offer alternative business models for the commercialization of applied research. And releasing our ideas lets us ensure that others don’t take credit for them; we’ve all heard of cases where ideas are stolen or grafted onto someone else’s project. This form of extreme plagiarism is rampant (perhaps nowhere more so than in academe).

In the headlong rush to the next big idea, the propensity to wall off ideas to protect their proprietary value stifles innovation. This is not to say that there should be no intellectual property protection; far from it. We publish results of our studies and protect trade secrets in order to ensure that our intellectual property accrues to us. This is as it should be. The trick is in finding a balance between the advance of knowledge and our right to protect our intellectual property from misuse and misappropriation.

Open Source IP

An article today about the Intellectual Property (IP) system calls for the open source model of technology development to be used by the drug development community. McGill University's Richard Gold of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy at McGill University. Open sourcing IP through collaborative engagement fits with technology development business models using the principles of open access. Wider diffusion could feasibly result in drug patents. The push behind this kind of open source learning or "crowdsourcing" reflects current trends in collaborating to compete as one avenue for fostering innovation.

Open Educational Resources OECD report released

Some time ago I participated in an OECD survey on Open Educational Resources. The final report has recently been released. "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources" offers those interested in open courseware-type resource sharing a current and comprehensive review of the educational/knowledge sharing space. Definitions, sustainability, intellectual property policies - all of these and more are covered in an interesting look at the content connections to the open source and open access movements. The report concludes with recommendations for making OER more useful and usable.

A colleague today, in discussing e-learning, talked about "learnability" - a word he used to describe the inherent ability of a given information artifact to enable learning. While learnability is used in usability to discuss how well a system enhances a user's potential ability to learn to use it, the use of this term as applied to content conjures interesting connections to the open source/access/learning movements. It relates well to the web n+1 environment where user-generated content overlays existing, freely available content. How well we can learn from this content depends on human-human interaction, one among many complex variables that define how education transmutes base informational elements into knowledge.

The value-add here is in the communities that develop around the use of applications to build knowledge on top of information. Where content was once king, it is now primus inter pares with the AJAX-inspired applications that let us do stuff with it.

Integrity, collaboration, ideas

The idea of collaborative knowledge building has come up a lot recently with colleagues with whom we are composing a CONII NCE Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research application. The goal is to facilitate knowledge creation around innovation clusters and applied research. This happens already, but recent publications like Wikinomics are bringing to the fore the notion of using web n+1 technologies to further open source learning and knowledge generation in a collaborative effort to take ideas from innovation to market.

There is a central tension here around balancing the open sharing of ideas and the need to protect intellectual property. Ideas in this sense are currency that have value only insofar as they are taken up and situated within social contexts. Social contracts around who "owns" an idea are precarious. Ideas emerge in discussion and within a context, just as innovation and invention evolve incrementally and involve many people building on others' ideas. Knowledge building works well within an innovation framework where there is a free flow of ideas, though ownership of these ideas can fast become an issue in the absence of trust and integrity.

The protection of IP is a topic of concern for the music industry, as we all know. Copyright in academic and research circles also has a long history. As the link to the article on the ecology of innovation makes clear, we need to incorporate IP and tax law within the social contexts of learning and idea formation as part of the function of research commercialization.

Legitimate peripheral participation, part of the theory developed by Lave and Wenger in their discourse around communities of practice, allows for a process of collaborative learning in which mentorship plays a key role. The business of innovation requires some basic protection of copyright, as well as a general collegial responsibility to acknowledge others' contributions. Are these two aspects of innovation commensurate with each other?

All research institutions subscribe to a policy of integrity in scholarly research. The fast scrum of innovation and ideas, establishing ownership of these ideas, and collaborating with integrity all require a careful balance between invention and disclosure in the complex matrix of collaboration. Learning from and with one another, and working towards common goals require us to foster open dialogue. There is great potential to "open source" the rapid development of ideas. But collaborating to compete together can prove difficult, requiring a high degree of trust and integrity, or else up front non-disclosure agreements that set some ground rules for the sharing of ideas in the first place. If nothing else, a clear understanding among all parties of expectations and roles is essential.

Darwinian R&D or, the ecology of innovation

On this the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, articles about a Darwinian approach to the economic meltdown are appearing as part of a capitalization on the event itself commensurate with a need to find ways to explain how best to fix the economy. A good example in today's Report on Business is an article about "The Natural Selector" and Darwin's approach to business. It echoes the oft-reported sentiment that businesses and banks should be left to fail as these are part of the natural order of things.

The set-up is trenchant:

What would Darwin have done?

If Charles Darwin were alive today, the scientific genius who gave the world the theory of natural selection would be on the prowl for businesses that make themselves fit for survival by adapting nimbly to change.*

Adapting to change in the current economic climate means focusing R&D efforts, already articulated in the federal Science and Technology Strategy. It also means paying attention to the environment of innovation where multiple facets of the R&D innovation chain can articulate social and economic productivity by working together. This "ecology of innovation" is the collaborate to compete or open source model that has emerged along with the Internet as a viable way of fostering what Chesbrough has called open innovation.

Speaking of which, Internet pioneer Mark Cuban has announced his own personal stimulus plan which he calls Open Source Funding. Call this an adaptive approach to start-up development.

As Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

Happy Darwin Day.

Credit transfer and open source learning

The Globe and Mail published today an op-ed I wrote on what I call open source learning and its relationship to an educational passport. It is part of the Re: Education Our Time to Lead series, which is generating interesting discussion about the future of education in Canada. The website contains a good interactive section on Transforming the ivory tower: The case for a new postsecondary education system, including my own video where I make the case for more outcomes-based learning.

Applied Research: Innovation, Productivity and the R&D Continuum

The ACCC 2009 Applied Research Symposium: What does success look like? was held in Ottawa on 25-26 February, and featured interesting and informative presentations about the role of colleges in the R&D innovation chain. The conference focused mainly on some of the issues involved in establishing college applied research: building a research culture, intellectual property, metrics, and community-focused versus industry focused research. Walter Stewart, from the Toronto Region Research Alliance, gave the opening keynote, and challenged the audience to focus our efforts in applied research capacity development on how we can serve our mandate to students and industry. In so doing, we must not try to be all and do all, but rather focus our efforts according to our strengths. This fits well with the notion of complementarity.

My own talk - from which I took the title of this post - was intended to illustrate the role of Polytechnic applied research. My focus was on topics I have written about here, and the shared challenge we all have to work within our areas (geographic, specialization): complementarity.

Here are my speaking notes:

Innovation

• Canada’s Innovation Capacity
• 13th out of 17 countries (OECD)
• “D” for innovation: “it’s been a D for decades”
  Conference Board of Canada, How Canada Performs: A Report Card on Canada
  
  Canada seems very good at inventing things, but not so good at capitalizing on inventions.

Productivity

• Canada is second in OECD for HERD; 12th in BERD
  HERD: Higher Education Expenditures on R&D
  BERD: Business Expenditures on R&D
• Firms are not making effective use of postsecondary applied R&D capabilities
  “We’ve gone too far in subsidizing R&D, and not far enough in subsidizing diffusion of innovation.” (Sharpe 2009)
  
  Our goal is to help firms make better use of applied R&D capabilities.

Role of the applied research office

• We focus on Regional R&D Capacity and Innovation Transfer and
• Complementarity in the R&D Continuum
  
  We are not trying to replicate what any of the university, government or industry research labs do. Rather, we do what they cannot do: fabrication of prototypes, for example.

Startup.edu

• We are a startup, and we help startups
• We offer “Last Mile” R&D services
• The Stages of technology development provide a useful framework for how we fit into the R&D continuum

How we’re different

• We respond to industry needs
• We have industry governance through the GBC Research Innovation Advisory Board
• The IAB is a multi-sectoral SME and entrepreneurial stakeholder group whose primary role is to provide a current and effective link between the Research and Innovation office at George Brown College and the key sectors it serves

Innovation Support Services

• We offer innovation support services to sector partners, using a validate/simulate/adaption model to
• Validate practicality and usability of new technologies/products/processes
• Simulate impact of their use
• Adapt those technologies for deployment under diverse conditions
  
• Testing practicality and market/user/practice adoption and adaptation lets us focus on the implementation of innovation
  
  This is the Diffusion of Innovation

From discovery to design

• Our Multidisciplinary Collaborative Problem Solving model mobilizes college disciplines in support of industry needs
• The intentional application of applied research and innovation services to industry needs and contexts means we focus less on discovery, and more on the design of innovation - how to test the practicality of new products or services (adoption and adaptation)
• Our model uses college verticals in a horizontal integration strategy
  This is a matrix for understanding our innovation intentionality:
  College disciplines are verticals of expertise. A project is a horizontal that accesses expertise as needed/required from each vertical.
• Move from idea to invoice

Innovation Literacy

• This is a cornerstone of what our students gain from participating in applied research projects: the ability to think creatively and apply problem-solving skills to diverse and intangible issues within industrial problems and contexts.
• Innovation literacy is a transferable skill that enables our students to be flexible innovators in the workforce.
• Our students are Highly Qualified and Skilled Personnel
  Innovation literacy is the creativity called for by Martin and Florida

Open Innovation

• “…the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.” (Chesbrough)
• All colleges, working together, can foster an open source approach to innovation and capacity building for improved social and economic productivity in Canada

Open Innovation Network

• Polytechnics are a de facto Applied Research Cluster (PARC)
  A distributed research cluster or open innovation network.
• AutoPARC
• EcoPARC
• EnviroPARC
• HealthPARC
• Etc.
  
• Fostering what the EU calls “Regions of knowledge” means that colleges can collaborate to compete together. We form an open innovation network that is more than the sum of its parts.

College and Community Innovation Program

• The NSERC CCIP represents a significant investment and awareness of the importance of colleges in the innovation chain in Canada.
• Relating back to HERD and BERD (see Productivity, above), the CCIP is a P3RD
  A Public Private Partnership R&D investment
• This is a public R&D subsidy that is specifically designed to increase BERD commensurate with HERD

We must take this opportunity, and, in recognizing it as P3RD, deploy these funds strategically to foster social and economic productivity. We have an important role to play in the R&D continuum in Canada, and that role should also focus on how colleges can work together - like the Polytechnic Applied Research Cluster model - to ensure that this capacity can realize its potential and contribute meaningfully to improving Canada's innovation capabilities. Canada's college are key to improving community economic and social development.

My challenge to us all is to make this collaboration work, to find ways to work together in a complementary fashion. It is important to celebrate our successes, but it is even more important now to look ahead to the future and chart where we are going. This future-forward orientation will be the focus of a panel I will be convening for the ACCC Annual Conference.

On collaboration

Recently I wrote about the collaborate to compete model of conspicuous contribution. I've been thinking a lot more about this lately as I've been working on building new partnerships around an existing project. I support the principles of open source learning and sharing information, methodologies, study designs etc. Often it's a balancing act between the desire to take credit for original work and the inclination to share freely the "academic source code" of our research designs. We can extend this thought to the development of technology and other intellectual property that arises from research. Having participated in the creation of many technologies over the past 10 years that have been taken to market to varying levels, I realize this is an issue that requires much forethought.

PEPTalk is one such technology. My colleague from Centennial College, Lynda Atack, and I have been awarded several grants to research and develop this technology that are enabling us to situate the use of PEPTalk within clinical environments over the next several years. This project is top of mind as we are now launching the second clinical deployment in a Family Health Team at the Toronto Western Hospital, after a successful usability trial there and in other clinics over the past year.

This past March I received a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the Advanced Patient Education for Cancer Survivors (APECS) project. Lynda and I have designed a study building on our earlier work that will integrate PEPTalk within the Cancer Survivorship program at Princess Margaret Hospital. We will work with colleagues at the University of Toronto to move the technology to the next level. We are engaged in a research design project for health informatics that combines our earlier work on usability with attempts to measure changes in self-efficacy.

We are using a quasi-experimental, pre-test post-test, mixed methods design that will measure the impact of the designated websites on five primary outcomes: 1) patient and clinician website usage, 2) patient and clinician satisfaction, 3) patient self-efficacy regarding disease management, empowerment and health behaviour activities, 4) site maintainability and 5) organizational support and uptake.

Our data collection instruments include a series of surveys we designed in combination with other surveys and evaluation metrics. I am looking forward to this study, which is being initiated and administered from George Brown College. I am particularly interested in testing our study design, which is also being used by colleagues in Princess Margaret Hospital to test other health informatics products.

Sharing our academic source code in this way helps us advance the science of health informatics. It also helps us learn from others.

Open Innovation [reprise]

With thanks to Andrew Jenkins, member of GBC's Innovation Advisory Board, for sending me this link to an excellent article: Open Innovation: from marginal to mainstream. Open innovation is a topic I've written about a few times, and refers to a collaborative, open source approach to the business of innovation - the concept of complementarity that governs our interconnectedness with other R&D organizations. 

Richard Florida speaks at GBC's annual Presidential Breakfast

President Anne Sado's Annual Breakfast to kick off the new academic year this year featured noted academic Richard Florida from UofT's Rotman School of Management. Florida's speech about the fabric of Toronto as composed of all educational institutions resonated with President Sado's message about the future GBC is charting with our new campus and educational pathways with Trent University. "Creativity is the font of our economic growth . . . and the basic resource or raw material for growth" Florida told the crowd. This message is central to Florida's thesis of the new creative economy as being the basis for the post-industrial (and perhaps even post-information) age.

The need to move "from a creative economy to a creative society" that includes leveraging the assets and strengths of new immigrants is well aligned with GBC's applied research mandate, and in particular our new program for internationally trained individuals in Research Commercialization and Innovation. The location of our new campus on the Toronto waterfront reinforces Toronto as a place of/for innovation; leveraging all aspects of the GTA as a virtual research cluster made up of complementary ad hoc teams is perhaps one way to conceptualize how we can collectively leverage both geographic location (proximity) with technology (the Internet) to create a seamless virtual research cluster from the disparate strands that comprise industrial and academic research institutions.

Florida spoke to the need to move from "Research, Teaching and Service" to "Discovery, Learning and Engagement." This is about "unlocking creativity" and how GBC is more nimble and connected to the local/regional economy (a particular strength of our educational and applied research capabilities). This last point resonates with an article from Saturday's Globe and Mail on Michael Heller's notion of the "gridlock economy." Heller's point is that we need open innovation - less control on patents and copyrights for example - in order to ensure that there is a free flowing of ideas and tweaking of existing ideas to make new and improved products and services. This open source learning or open access approach leads to improved productivity and more diffuse - perhaps regional - innovation (the "rising tide" approach to development). Regional development in this context acknowledges the explicit histories that are part of all innovations.

"no one is as smart as everyone": crowdsourcing and virtual research clusters

Here is a good article that looks at crowdsourcing with a keen discussion on its benefits and limitations. An open source approach to IP generation and innovation generally is clearly the model for building innovation systems such as what I've proposed in the discussion about a virtual or distributed research cluster, using the precepts of open innovation. But the point made in this article about balancing crowdsourcing with the encouragement of individuals is very trenchant. This illustrates the principle of innovation literacy at all levels of the workforce, what we call the multiplier effect. Conspicuous contribution in open innovation systems is the new normal for the innovation economy.

Conspicuous contribution and the policy and practice of enabling innovation

The Ontario Chamber of Commerce released their Emerging Stronger 2013 report recently, and it has some notable elements for enabling the innovation economy. These include closing skills gaps, notably in apprenticeship training, and ensuring there are strong links between education and industry (a core mandate for colleges), including for applied R&D. On the R&D side, here is an interesting take on tech transfer that links well to the notion of open source development communities and giving back more than you take. This is the value espoused by Tim O'Reilly; read about it here. Conspicuous contribution will be the norm going forward, and as we reorient the Canadian innovation system to a "collaborate to compete together" model, we will see more of this kind of thinking permeate the policy and practice of enabling both invention and innovation. This is an open, participatory, and people-centred innovation, and it is coming soon to an organization near you.

On the topic of better linking education to the needs of industry  I was interviewed for a MacLean's piece recently that discusses "the missing link": the disconnect between student expectations and finding a job. Unfortunately, the writer told only half the story here in terms of quoting me as saying that the university system does not teach about jobs, whereas the college system does. And there is a good reason for this. Universities have always prided themselves as being outside the purview of the reality of explicit job training (with the exception of professional programs). The college system on the other hand is an instrument of the state created to ensure there is an adequate work force. Both are necessary; neither alone is sufficient.

Collaborate to Compete

Also the title of a recent book, the phrase Collaborate to Compete aptly describes the philosophy of CONII, and the move of Ontario Colleges to work together to provide a virtual research cluster or network model to facilitate application of applied research into industrial contexts. I heard about this book from a former colleague, and the core idea is a good one. The basic idea is that we can be stronger if we work together.

I thought of this book and the concept this morning while at the CONII Industry Strategy Board. This was my first attendance at this meeting, and I was impressed by the commitment of representatives from industry to the College applied research agenda. The discussion about collaboration was predicated on the application of the CONII model into industrial contexts. That is, CONII is a consortium of colleges that are collaborating on applied research. Each college either leads or is a part of a particular node on the network. If a potential industrial research partner contacts a college, and that college does not have the expertise in that area, the idea is that this college would forward the potential partner to one of the CONII member colleges that specialize in the area of concern. This is an ideal application of the virtual research cluster: an emergent phenomenon that is gaining traction with the spread of ubiquitous broadband and the ancillary network effects.

This model of collaboration and conspicuous contribution is counter to the historical competitive model that all colleges have grown in to (indeed, it is the hallmark of business in general). The idea that we can collaborate to compete has its roots in the strengths of network thinking and the kind of transparency encouraged by open source, and perhaps even the credo of hiding in plain site.

It was pointed out at the meeting that to make CONII work will require a lot of trust. The first steps have already been taken.

Why we need colleges, polytechnics and universities

Charles Pascal has an excellent article in the Globe's Our Time to Lead feature on Re:Education, called Students lose in Ontario’s postsecondary patchwork, in which he aptly describes the need for a range of education options that work as a system. He refers primarily to Ontario, but it could easily apply to Canada as a whole, as I pointed out in my recent op-ed on open source learning. This is further reinforced by the weekend's article What Canada needs: A national strategy for students. The exemplary thinking here on important issues facing Canada come as we stare down the need to up our game in the innovation economy. It is time for Canada to get on par with our OECD counterparts and take seriously the connections between social and economic prosperity and instrumentality in education  It is time to rethink how teaching and research function to instill innovation skills in our graduates  And it is time to embrace what Pascal calls the "galloping elitism" that makes us eschew the necessary technical and vocational skills and undergraduate teaching as we privilege the a priori in a global race for talent and R&D impact. The  Globe series - and Pascal's read of the Ontario education system - should be required reading for all involved in education, teaching and research. 

The ecology of innovation

A while back I wrote about the memetics of innovation as part of the process of discovery, open source learning and collaboration as the cornerstones of fostering a culture of inquiry and innovation in applied research.

Here's a good article on the "ecology of innovation," a useful term coined by William Wulf, that adds to this conversation. What I like about this piece is Wulf's assertion that "learning and investment are not enough," as he expands the recipe for innovation to include IP and tax law and the apparatus that collectively governs the ways in which we understand, conduct, and commercialize applied research.

Of particular relevance is the point that "His argument for diversity is not based on fairness, but rather on the value of bringing diverse social and cultural perspectives to the design of products and procedures that will be used by diverse people around the world."

Skills and education instrumentality

The recent Globe and Mail Our Time to Lead series on education offered many compelling stories on the need to transform education. For my own part, I remain mystified why some in the post secondary education world tend to avoid any talk of outcomes, namely jobs. As I pointed out in the online interactive video I did for the series, why is that career centres on Canada's university campuses are an after thought? Why do we leave it to the imagination of students to think about their future careers, when we could be encouraging people to apply what they learn to important social and economic issues. I allude to this in my op-ed on what I call open source learning. Today's Globe has an article by Gwyn Morgan in which he talks about the fact that Divisions between haves and have-nots begin with having skills – or not. His point is similar - we ignore outcomes for education at our social and economic peril. Our future productivity and competitiveness depend on having a highly educated and skilled work force. Those who sit in the ivory tower and eschew the very real fact that finding one's way in the world means finding meaningful work are perpetuating our downward slide into even poorer productivity. It's time we challenged these nostrums and exposed them for what they are: dangerous assumptions that ignore present - and future - realities.

To this point, our recent study Toronto Next: Return on Innovation clearly shows that employers want people who can apply their skills to work. This is a central aspect of innovation literacy.

On interaction, integration

Here are some more thoughts on people-centred innovation following this train of thought:

Some time ago I read a book by the founder of Ideo in which they talk a lot about human centred design. In trolling through the G-List search string I came across their site for a human centred design toolkit, "A free innovation guide for social enterprises and NGOs worldwide." It's worth a look. The principles of human centred design (HCD) are, as I've indicated earlier, highly amenable and adaptable to innovation. Focusing on how any innovation will have downstream impact - from people to social/economic productivity - is an essential way to ensure adoption. As noted in my twitter feed a while ago, "adoptation" is my new word to describe applied research and promoting the adoption/adaptation of innovation. Adoptation requires integrated thinking, it requires interaction among the users and producers of innovation, and it requires us to think about the people who will use a new product or service from the outset of design. it also requires conspicuous contribution - an open source approach to collaboration and complementarity.

Polytechnics Canada and Conspicuous Contribution to Public Policy

The Annual Polytechnics Canada conference convened at Humber College last week, once again offering excellent discussion and contributions to Canadian public policy. "Learning that works" was the theme that saw very good keynote presentations ranging from insight from the Swiss education model to the changes being undertaken in Ontario. On the latter, MTCU Deputy Minister Sheldon Levy provided insights on innovating education, drawing on his work leading the Digital Media Zone Ryerson University.

Michael Horn, Co-Founder and Distinguished Fellow from Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation provided excellent insights into the disruption of education, showing how personalization of education and micro-credentials are setting up a sea change in the way education is proffered and taken. The rise of micro-credentials is something I've been interested in for some time, something I've outlined in a Globe and Mail op-ed in 2012 called Education should take a lesson from the open-source movement.

Another keynote by Jeff Selingo, Columnist for the Washington Post gave the crowd some additional insights into the employer context, specifically around the skills needed to thrive in the innovation economy. Career navigation is important to the current and ensuing generations, and providing skills such as curiosity, grit, creativity and contextual thinking are hallmarks of innovation literacy. GBC Research supports skills development with validation in micro-credentials via our innovation skills badges.

Navigation requires skills, which become the sextant for the innovation economy, enabling students to measure the angles between where they are and where they wish to go. Once again, Polytechnics Canada convenes a conference that demonstrates thought leadership through conspicuous contribution to public policy.