The GBC Green Building Centre: Open For Business Innovation

The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for the Federal Economic Development agency of Southern Ontario (FEDDEV) and Member of Parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore Bernard Trottier were at our Casa Loma campus today to officially open the Green Building Centre. Many of our industry partners were on hand to celebrate the opening. The Green Building Centre is GBC's newest applied research facility that is supporting the growing Canadian green and smart building market. Prior to the ribbon cutting, The Minister, MP Trottier and industry guests toured the various labs developed with funding from FEDDEV:

• Building Information Modeling
• Advanced Prototyping
• Building Materials
• Building Sciences
• Building Automation

The Green Building Centre also features a Building Accelerator and Entrepreneurship Space for industry partners to work with our students and faculty on applied research projects.

Minister Goodyear, who in a former post was the Minister of State for Science and Technology, has presided over the development of the college applied research capacity in Canada. In his speech Minister Goodyear talked about the strengths of Canada's excellent basic science R&D capacity (as recently outlined by the Council of Canadian Academies), but the need to also focus on developing our business R&D capacity. Facilities like the Green Building Centre are helping companies to invest in R&D and to develop new products and services. This applied research helps to translate the results of basic science into innovation, which means jobs and wealth in the economy. Already the Green Building Centre  has resulted in 59 new jobs, and helped our partner firms commercialize new products in the green building industry.

When companies work with colleges and polytechnics on applied research, not only are new products taken to market, but the next generation of skilled, innovation-literate graduates gain valuable industry experience. This experience complements the technical skills gained through our programs. The multiplier effect of funding such as that from FEDDEV is helping George Brown College to help industry to innovate in important areas of the economy. (In addition to Green Building, we are very active through our Food Innovation Research Studio and in health technology). Today's opening marks the official launch of the Green Building Centre, where we are open for business innovation.

Education n+1

Today's Globe and Mail has an informative piece by Kevin Lynch, who, in Education 2.0, outlines views that education needs a focus on outcomes, and should include experiential learning. He offers a helpful insight that "The public education system is still organized around separate K-to-12 systems, community college systems and university systems, but the student is really engaged in a 'K-to-work' journey." Lynch quotes Rick Miner's work on "people without jobs and jobs without people" as indicative of the looming skills gap and skills shortage, something Nobina Robinson pointed out last week in her Globe op-ed. This is the kind of reasoned approach we need in Canada: orienting our education system to outcomes relevant to the needs of the economy (social, economic), and acknowledging the span of education  that serves this purpose. Colleges and polytechnics have been promoting the value of outcomes-based and experiential learning as important drivers of the economy. When innovation is linked to learning outcomes and industry needs (for education and applied research), we have a better chance of future proofing our productivity.

Fixing the brain drain requires the right skills

Polytechnics Canada CEO Nobina Robinson has an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that outlines important issues for the Canadian economy. In Business must share responsibility for shortage of skilled workers, Robinson provides a fresh perspective on the "brain drain" and what key steps Canada needs to take to solve our looking skills shortage. The piece follows on the Globe front page story on the government's intent to do something about apprenticeship and the skills issues we are grappling with - issues that have deep impacts on the economy. I was especially interested to read about the comparison to the German model. There are some interesting links to labour market preparation, economic productivity, and innovation that emerge from the German system of linking education to the world of work, and linking applied research to the needs of industry.

There are two fronts here:
1. The apprenticeship issue, and the relationship to the skills gap/mismatch in the economy; and
2. The general need to encourage the development of innovation skills, with a commensurate focus on outcomes based education, where this is applicable.

As I said earlier, innovation is where the puck is; skills are where the puck is going.

#skillsarewherethepuckisgoing

Skills: where the puck is going

Dave McGinn, in today's Globe and Mail, has a good story about the shortage of skilled trades and the need for apprenticeship reform. "Looking for a job? Consider a trade" reinforces the huge skills gap that is looming in Canada. Our future productivity hinges on our ability to get more people working in the skilled trades, as well as to focus on how skills can be applied to work contexts. These are two separate but related issues.

The skilled trades are the knowledge workers of the innovation economy. As Ken Doyle of Polytechnics Canada has said, the skilled trades have literally built the knowledge economy. The importance of getting more people into trades, and ensuring that we modernize and thus have a robust apprenticeship program cannot be understated. Two Budget 2013 recommendations by Polytechnics Canada focus on this issue.

The applicability of skills more generally is also important  and it links to recent discussions about learning outcomes in post secondary education. That is, when we show our students what their programs teach them in terms of skills, our graduates are better able to articulate these skills learned into their future work places. This instrumentality and a focus on learning outcomes of programs is a hallmark of the college and polytechnic education, but is generally eschewed by our universities, for the simple reason that these systems have entirely different reasons for being.

My point here is that when we focus on outcomes, we enable learners to find pathways to employment and productivity. At George Brown College we say that we focus on the admixture of the hard and soft skills - a combination of the psychomotor and cognitive domains of learning. When we add to this experiential learning (such as applied research with industry), we enable learners to enter the affective domain of learning, a staple of innovation literacy. This means an attitudinal shift in our approach to work, my hypothesis being that it will lead to a more productive and innovative society.

We focus a lot on innovation and how to enable it, and with a renewed focus on how we create the skills encompassed by innovation literacy we aim through the target into the future.

Innovation is where the puck is; skills are where the puck is going.

Policy prescriptions and the evolution of education

Polytechnics Canada has released some policy prescriptions for the federal government to consider in the upcoming budget, focusing on the skills mismatch in the economy and support for innovation. Six ideas are put forward that will go a long way toward encouraging innovation in firms and ensuring that firms have the right people with the right skills in the right jobs. An SME innovation voucher system - such as that which Ontario is rolling out, and which is active in Alberta and Atlantic Canada; an increase in the College and Community Innovation Program funding for applied research with firms; and measures to enhance and encourage apprenticeship completion through smart procurement and reallocation of program directives. This is the kind of incremental policy innovation that can pay real dividends in the economy.

And there is a need to amplify our efforts to be more proactive and instrumental in promoting greater innovation and productivity in Canada. A recent study by the BDC shows that there are some alarming signals of disruption in the Canadian business landscape (see Canada’s Mid-Sized Firms in Decline, BDC Study Shows). Jeffrey Simpson, in today's Globe and Mail editorial, outlines the impact on manufacturing. "Hollow out manufacturing and the economy suffers," he says, warning us that in this "Canada remains, overall, a hewer of wood and drawer of water." As I've said before, we need to focus on adding value - to raw resources and the ideas and inventions emerging from our basic research alike. We need to focus on complementarity in our approach to mixing public and private interests when it comes to R&D. This applies equally to education. It's time to refocus our discussion on outcomes, and to orient the education and innovation systems to fixing what ails our economy.

It would be amusing were it not so tragic that we do not focus enough on how the education systems we have can be better put to use in promoting more innovation. Instead of furrowing our collective brows over whether or not the college or the university system is better, we would be better off using these furrows to plant the seeds for change. I read with interest a recent MacLean's article on the propagandist take on the value of a university degree over all else. The so-called million-dollar promise is shown to be false, ably demonstrated by Ken Coates and Bill Morrison. The reality is that there is not so neat a dividing line between these solitudes of Canadian education.

Data from Colleges Ontario show that according to the Student Satisfaction KPI Survey, about 12% of students enrolled in Ontario colleges have completed a university degree and 41% have prior experience in the post-secondary system. At George Brown College 45% of 2010-11 students had previous post-secondary experience, and 27% had previously completed a post-secondary credential (10.6% had completed a college diploma and 17.3% had completed a university degree).

While we argue which is better or leads to more productivity, we risk squandering a resource base of the world's leading tertiary education attainment. Other countries are outpacing us at the rate at which younger generations are attaining tertiary education  The university and college systems do different things, and these are complementary. As I said earlier: both are necessary; neither alone is sufficient. The real issue we need to address is to ensure that we are producing the talent that our economy needs, now and in the future.

Here's a parable: We are all primates, monkeys hanging from a tree branch. I believe that my branch is better than your branch, simply because it is the branch that I am hanging on to. As soon as we both realize that my branch and your branch are part of the same tree, the sooner we can both climb down from the tree and walk across the steppe together. That's evolution.

Innovation literacy, skilled trades, and the economy

Happy new year!

The Ontario Jobs and Prosperity Council last month released "Advantage Ontario," a comprehensive report outlining how Ontario can "become more competitive and seize opportunities in the new global economy or our prosperity will decline, " according to the press release, which goes on to say that "The report identifies five key areas for action: going global; driving productivity growth; unleashing innovation and entrepreneurship; capitalizing on strength in talent and delivering smart, efficient government."

Today's Academica outlines the report's focus on the skilled trades and experiential learning. Both of these are important facets of our economy. Canada currently faces a real need for more skilled trades, and ensuring we can produce the trades we need, along with other knowledge workers, is key to our future prosperity. The Ontario Jobs and Prosperity Council report contains some good recommendations, key among these are "Introducing a business-led commercialization voucher to better link research to business needs." The SME voucher system has been proposed by Polytechnics Canada in their Statement to the House of Commons Industry, Science and Technology Committee and Statement to the Standing Committee on Finance's 2012 Pre-Budget Consultation. Such vouchers work well in other provinces, and implementing these here in Ontario will go a long way to encouraging firms to innovate. The vouchers let the market decide where to get help with applied research needs. polytechnics, colleges, universities  even private R&D labs, can all collaborate to compete together to serve the needs of innovative firms looking to get new products and services to market. Letting firms decide who can best serve their needs is a good way to ensure that the needs of firms are put first in the applied research endeavour.

At George Brown College, we are focused on preparing students for employment success. When we engage students in applied research, they gain innovation literacy skills while helping firms innovate. Our focus is on firm success, who can then hire our graduates to further their innovation goals. A key area of applied research for us is the Green Building Centre, funding for which was announced last year. FEDDEV Ontario has provided funding for the Green Building Centre which will enable us to link the training of the skilled trades to applied research in the green building area. Linking innovation  innovation literacy, and applied research with the skilled trades is a signal advantage of George Brown College and the Green Building Centre. We will be posting more information on this innovative and unique approach to education and applied research throughout the year as we continue to build the physical infrastructure we are using to support our partner firms.

On this note, it is important to point out the Polytechnics Canada Statement to the House of Commons Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, in which Polytechnics Canada Director of Policy Ken Doyle outlines key ideas for addressing Canada's skilled trades and apprenticeship needs. This is required reading for anyone interested in Canada's future prosperity. As he points out, the skilled trades have literally built the knowledge economy. It's time we focused on building on our foundation of basic science excellence, and capitalizing on the trend emergent of making stuff. I've written here before about this trend - and the latest issue of Wired Magazine has an excellent article (about robots) on how the future of manufacturing will be focused on proximity; this is the re-shoring of manufacturing. It's coming, and our graduates are at the forefront of this change.