City of Toronto Launches Digital Main Street

Yesterday marked the launch of Digital Main Street a new program from the City of Toronto and the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas focused on helping main street businesses connect to digital tools to help them manage and grow their businesses. This is an exciting initiative that will help Toronto businesses get online where their customers are. GBS students have been involved in the Digital Main Street Project through startGBC, our Gateway to Entrepreneurship.

As outlined on the site:

By joining Digital Main Street, main street businesses receive a free digital assessment and a recommended to-do list that identifies technologies and service providers that can help businesses meet their digital goals.

Graphic of Digital Main Street project

GBC Applied Research Day a Success

The annual George Brown College Applied Research Day was held this past Monday and was a great success, convening 200 faculty, students and research partners for an afternoon of dialogue, discussion and a tour through the Galaxy of Research. A highlight this year was the student start-up pitch competition that saw five student entrepreneurs vie for a spot at the GBC Research OCE Discovery booth and $500 in applied research services to support their venture. Congratulations to mywinecanada.com - I encourage everyone to check out this exciting business that enables wineries in Canad to sell wines direct to consumers.

The annual Applied Research Day demonstrates the strength of applied research at the College. Our faculty, industry and community partners spoke about curricular innovation, social innovation and industrial innovation – three facets of innovation that give our students key innovation skills while creating social and economic value in our community.

One of the things that struck me was how applied research offers an "unstructured structure" to curricula at the College. That is, we have the structure of engaging with partners on applied research and giving these experiences to our students as part of the educational environment. But we do not know how these projects will turn out, Some will success, others will fail, some will get taken in new and unplanned directions. This is the beauty of why applied research works so well to instill innovation skills in our students. It requires extemporaneous thinking and perseverance. It promotes outside the box thinking and the acquisition of innovation literacy, skills that foster resilience, problem solving and entrepreneurial thinking. 

A highlight for me was speaking to the many students who attended, and who attested to how working with our partners on the many projects helped them gain innovation literacy. These students have the skills needed for the economy of today and tomorrow, proving our strategic imperative of Enabling the Innovation Economy.

GBC Applied Research Day 2016 Logo

SSHRC launches new Strategic Plan

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has recently launched an updated Strategic Plan: Advancing Knowledge for Canada’s Future. Three objectives are outlined:

• To enable excellence in a changing research landscape
• To create opportunities for research and training through collaborative initiatives
• To connect social sciences and humanities research with Canadians 

The document is well worth a read - the social and human sciences are increasingly important to realizing the value of innovation and the Strategic Plan shows why. I am a proud supporter of SSHRC and a member  of their Programs and Quality Committee.  This has given me a front row seat to the excellent work SSHRC sponsors across universities and colleges.

While the important of science, technology engineering and math (STEM) are well touted in the media, perhaps less understood is the role of design, business, and social innovation in the overall innovation discussion. SSHRC President Ted Hewitt, states in the document that "The humanities and social sciences have contributed much to our understanding and appreciation of Canada’s rich history, ethnic and cultural diversity and dynamic rural and urban economies." Here at GBC to prove this we need look no further than four recently awarded social innovation research awards from SSHRC - read about our four research teams here.

As the government works on a new Innovation Agenda, SSHRC's updated Strategic Plan offers a key road map for investment and increasing social and economic productivity and prosperity in Canada. A participatory, people-centred innovation agenda will maximize input from the humanities and social sciences and ensure that Canada continues to lead in research excellence and its application into areas of national importance.

At its core innovation is a mind set

"At its core innovation is a mind set" said the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development during a lunch time speech at the Toronto Region Board of Trade. And he is right. Minister Bains made the point repeatedly that Canada should be telling the world about our business strength, our leading position as tertiary educated population (including college and university graduate), our leading basic research capacity. Where we need to do more is in translating this into innovation for Canada. His speech was followed by a panel of discussants and a follow on response by the Minister. All in all, a good discussion on the importance of innovation, and importantly, what the federal government will do about our poor record in innovation.

Minister Bains called for Canada to leverage Canada's diversity for competitiveness and prosperity. To focus on the range of industries in the country, old, new and emergent. Innovation is the ability to find solutions to big problems, and this includes social innovation, he said.

And while the focus is on many industries, clean tech is a priority and not just to our country; it represents 3 trillion to the world economy. "A clean environment means a strong economy" and this will be a focus in the upcoming budget and the Innovation Agenda he has been mandated to create. Collaboration will be a hall mark of this Innovation Agenda - not just in how it will be created via the consultations such as that today, but also in how innovation is supported. This includes the development of clusters: the Government is committed to creating a national network of clusters to replicate the success of DMZ and MaRS. This is a good ting. We have a well defined ecosystem wherein colleges, polytechnics and universities work in concert to support innovation in the public and private sectors. "Innovation is a team effort" the Minister said, and this complementary approach ensures that the right people, with the right skills and the right context are applied to innovation needs as they arise. 

Fundamentally Innovation is about investing in people the Minister told the crowd. This includes STTEM skills and coding - ensuring that our youth can be both producers and consumers in the technologically mediated world. This world will be defined by a focus on climate change and clean tech; Clean Tech companies and technology are important to government because they are important to the society of today and tomorrow. Innovation must be done in a global context, the Minster reminded the audience, and this is Canada's time to lead.

Innovation policy the rhetoric of research

There has been some good coverage in the Globe and Mail recently on innovation policy in Canada, leveraging the current election to promote fruitful discussion on this important aspect of public policy. One of the better pieces was by Doug Saunders on Saturday, where he asks "The question of Election 2015: Can government create jobs and growth?". In a nutshell he lays bare the need for government intervention in the economy specifically as it relates to promoting innovation in extant and emergent industrial sectors. The government's role is not to pick winners and losers, but rather to create gravitational pull towards specific goals such that industries can develop. Most importantly he cites the work of Mariana Mazzucato and her book The Entrepreneurial State (a must read). We need to get away from the tax incentives as a spur to innovation - these are not working. Instead, direct supports - such as those recommended by Polytechnics Canada  recently - will go much further in supporting a holistic approach to both industrial and academic R&D productivity. This point, made by Saunders and repeated today by Kevin Lynch, is seemingly not well understood in Canada.

Saunders makes a significant error in his reporting; in paraphrasing Mazzucato, he talks about the Canadian predilection to invest in what he calls "pure research." In the quote from Mazzucato, she talks about the continuum of basic research, applied research, and commercialization. It is worth quoting this passage in its entirety:

“What doesn’t work,” Dr. Mazzucato says, “is when the direct investments are too focused on one part of the innovation chain. The kind of active government involvement that was characteristic of Silicon Valley and places like Denmark – that government involvement has been across the entire innovation chain. Basic research? Yes. Applied research and early-stage financing for companies? Yes. Those countries that think they can just spend a lot on science and a lot on basic research and assume business can take care of the rest, without also having a strong presence in public policy – they tend to fail.”

Saunders's error is a linguistic one that is common among Canada's R&D policy set: equating basic research with the term pure research automatically confers on applied research and commercialization the connotation that this is impure. You might think this does not matter. But language constitutes reality, and in the partisan world of research funding, where one is seen as preferable to the other in the scrum for scant dollars, we would be wise to heed Mazzucato's words to diversify our investments along the innovation chain.

Saunders should be aware of this linguistic issue, having written arguably one of the better histories of Canada's consistent failure to embrace innovation in a 2012 piece called "My ancestors and the worst thing that has ever happened to this country." In this, he outlines may aspects of the historical antecedents of our long standing failure to capitalize on anything other than raw resources, and how

the idea of an individualistic, entrepreneurial, industrially adventurous economy became alien and undesirable. The hewing of wood, the drawing of water and the selling of furs may been the origins of Canada, but the post-1812 rulers turned them into an unavoidable fate.

With the opportunity before us to engage in dialogue and debate, I believe we can turn around this "unavoidable fate."

On that note, a good read on the connections between all forms of research and the complementary aspects of various education outcomes can be found in Fragmented Systems: Connecting Players in Canada’s Skills Challenge, released this week by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. 

Job makers and job takers

Yesterday's news from the Conference Board that Canada still remains "an innovation laggard" is disheartening to say the least. There is some good news in that Canada has improved on some measures, and the report on the page linked above reminds us that a focus on incremental innovation is a valid path for companies to pursue. The Globe Report on Business story about this latest innovation scorecard contains reference to the new indicator of entrepreneurial ambition, on which Canada scores well. This is an important point that is well worth emphasizing.

George Brown College understands employment - this is core to our Strategy 2020. We rightfully focus on ensuring employment outcomes for our graduates - making sure that where the labour market is headed is where our graduates get jobs and excel in them. GBC was a partner on a recent labour market information report by the Toronto Region Board of Trade that offers the best LMI available for the region - find it here: Closing the Prosperity Gap.

The point here is that we focus on job takers - preparing people to take the jobs in the economy that need to be filled.

We also need to focus on the job makers - those people who have entrepreneurial ambition and who are creating companies and jobs in the economy. startGBC, GBC's gateway to entrepreneurship is our access point for the job makers in our programs. There are many programs and post-secondary institutions focusing on entrepreneurship, from MaRS to Ryerson University's DMZ. All have in common what the Conference Board is measuring as entrepreneurial ambition, which "helps shape the entrepreneurial and innovation performance of an economy." 

We should celebrate our A rating on this factor, and do more to encourage not just the jobs takers - who need innovation literacy to help companies and entrepreneurs to be more innovative and productive - but the job makers, who will create jobs, opportunities and new industries in the years to come.

Open Access and the Difference Makers

Minister of State for Science and Technology the Honourable Ed Holder today addressed the Economic Club on the federal government's Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy. The biggest news of the day was the announcement of the new Open Access Publishing policy for federally funded research. This is a Big Deal. What it means is that Canadians will have access to all published data of publicly funded research. The Tri-Council agencies have been working on this for some time and this is very good for the Canadian research community and the general public. Breaking down barriers between research and the public is a good thing to do. As a member of the SSHRC Programs and Quality Committee I am very pleased to see this reach fruition; SSHRC has been a strong supporter of this initiative. Congratulations are in order for all concerned.

Minister Holder gave a good overview of the government's new ST&I Strategy, outlining the investments in basic and applied research, from universities to colleges and industry-academic partnerships. He also spoke about the need to encourage more STEM education - I know Canada has a deficit here (as it does in industry investment in R&D, but that's coincidence not correlation or causation). Calling young people in STEM fields "the difference makers" Minister Holder outlined how youth today growing into STEM disciplines and careers are very much part of the foundation for the country's future. Making a difference is what counts, and entrepreneurship - a key tenet of the Strategy - is also a foundation of making a difference. On that note, check out StartGBC - our new gateway to entrepreneurship at George Brown College.

startGBC

It's a new year and a good time to startGBC. startGBC is our new "gateway to entrepreneurship at George Brown College." Funded by the Government of Ontario’s On-Campus Entrepreneurship Activities (OCEA) program, startGBC  is part of the Youth Jobs Strategy and is managed by the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE). startGBC is "a virtual hub connecting students, alumni and the community with resources, programs and support to foster a culture of entrepreneurship on campus and beyond."

startGBC marks GBC's entry into official sponsorship of student entrepreneurship. While we have supported many students since we started the Research Office in 2007, our focus has been on enabling industry-academic partnerships. With OCEA funding, startGBC is now offering students direct support for innovation and entrepreneurship activities. As with our applied research activities we are functioning as part of a well established ecosystem - startGBC partners include Ryerson University, MaRS and Accelerator U.

Check it out, and sign up for updates on the startGBC website.