All Posts Tagged With: "innovation"

Canada’s coolest undergraduate research opportunities

Dalhousie student researcher. By Andrew Tolson.

From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings. Get your copy today.

Contrary to popular belief—and what you may see in the movies—academic research isn’t only for master’s students, and undergrads do more than just drink beer: they do research, too. In fact, there are lots of exciting collaborative research projects currently underway at universities across the country, where undergraduate students and professors are working together to help change the learning landscape. See for yourself, below.

University of British Columbia

UBC master’s students Samantha Brennan and Aidan Whiteley—with the guidance of their cartography and society professor, Jon Corbett—are still engaged in the research project they began as undergraduate students in 2009. When the Okanagan campus undergrads realized that forest fire maps were inaccessible to the public, they enlisted Corbett’s help in building a fire-mapping tool that local residents could use to access data on burn areas, as well as review actual human experiences pertaining to the fires—as opposed to only facts and figures. Brennan and Whiteley’s project, which has been dubbed the “Facebook of forest fires,” also included real-time Internet videos and timelines.

Continue reading No master’s needed

Should government funding go to lab coats or white collars?

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

As defenders of the downtrodden go, Roger Martin deserves points for chutzpah at least. It’s harder to feel sympathy for Martin’s chosen underprivileged group than it would be if he were sticking up for, say, orphans and widows—because Martin has spent much of the year arguing that Canadians, and especially their governments, aren’t giving enough money to the country’s business schools.

At first glance, Canadians might be reluctant to shed a tear. Martin is the dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, not conspicuously a hardship case. The school has raised $130 million on its way to a $200-million fundraising target, timed to coincide with next year’s opening of a new 15,000-sq.-m building in downtown Toronto. But its successes, Martin maintains, come despite the lack of adequate government support, especially from Ottawa.

Continue reading Poor little rich M.B.A.s

Will education play a role in the campaign?

According to the Toronto Star, education should be a major feature of an election.

Investing in innovation. The Conservatives did a poor job in their anti-recession stimulus package of building for the future. They could have turned the crisis into an opportunity, but their 2009 budget actually cut funding for scientific research (though they later addressed that mistake by creating more research chairs and luring world-class researchers to Canada). But the steps are still tentative: last year’s federal budget increased Ottawa’s spending on R&D by $200 million — while President Barack Obama was upping U.S. spending by $15 billion.

Canada needs to step up dramatically in this area. Our economy now runs on ideas; more and more of us discover, design and create things. Waterloo’s Research in Motion is the poster child for that kind of innovation, but we need much more. What kind of investment in research and higher education do the parties propose to keep the country competitive for the next generation?

While it is unclear whether education and research will play a central role in a campaign, all three parties have introduced, or hinted, at what their education platforms could look like. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff says he plans to focus on access for students and has, in the past, endorsed centralization by creating a dedicated higher education transfer to the provinces, presumably with conditions similar to the Canada Health Act. We could likely expect something similar from the NDP.

And, if the Tory budget, released earlier this week, really is to double as an election platform, their position is to focus on targeted research for the physical, engineering and technological sciences, while mostly limiting support for students through established programs such as the Canada Student Loans and Grants programs. The Tories have, in the past, promoted developing something similar to a dedicated transfer in higher education, largely through working with the provinces to outline priorities and demanding reporting for how transfers are spent, though they have been slow to follow up.

The federal role in post-secondary education has always been a bit murky. Ottawa is involved in student loans, in part, because it holds jurisdiction over the banking sector, but the provinces still retain responsibility for determining a student’s eligibility for loans. Because of the presumed importance of research to economic development, a large federal role in this area could arguably be justified under the trade and commerce power.

In any case, all three parties advocate a visible role for the federal government in this education and research, with the NDP and the Liberals likely to promise a more robust presence for Ottawa, and the Tories likely to take a more incrementalist approach more in line with the constitutional division of powers.

How to attract human capital and find a place for science students in industry

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:

Much of the debate over innovation and productivity in Canada focusses on ideas: the search for a new research breakthrough that changes the way we see the world. Governments’ R&D policy concentrates on steering dollars toward types of research that might produce the kind of discovery that can pay off in the marketplace.

But what if the most valuable product from higher education isn’t the ideas but the people who generate them—the superbly educated graduates with advanced math and science degrees?

That question fascinates Arvind Gupta, a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University. He is also CEO of MITACS, a federally funded Centre of Excellence in information technology.

MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) was one of more than a dozen Centres of Excellence set up by the Mulroney and Chrétien governments to encourage industry and academia to work closely together in specific areas. And it didn’t attract much attention outside computer-science circles until it launched a little internship program in 2003.

That year, 18 doctoral students in maths and science were placed for four-month internships at Canadian companies. The students’ mandate was to tackle a technical problem the company was facing. But science students are problem-solvers born and bred; as often as not, they found other ways to improve the work their host companies were doing. Both sides had to make a real investment: the company paid $7,500 for the extra help, and the students had to report back to their PhD advisors on the work they’d done.

The internship program, dubbed Accelerate, took off. From 18 internships in 2003 it grew to 608 in 2009 and doubled again to more than 1,200 this year. That growth is not artificial. It is demand-driven. As word spreads about how creative these young recruits could be, businesses lined up to get involved. “Our goal is to get this up to 10,000 projects a year,” Gupta says.

Milloy will now be doing double duty

The Canadian Press is reporting that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty will be shuffling his cabinet following the resignation of a key minister who left to lead Toronto’s economic development agency.

Current Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities John Milloy will remain in his portfolio and be promoted to double duty as Minister of Research and Innovation.

This is a positive move by the Premier’s office, especially due to the overlap in infrastructure funding for universities between the two ministries.

I hope Milloy gains some of the staff from the present minister of research and innovation. That Minister’s office has been well-run during the past two years.

Milloy is one of the more talented members of the Executive Council and is more than capable of managing both portfolios.