Innovation

Not sure if I have blogged about this (and I'm too lazy to check!), but I have been appointed to the Board of the Innovation Institute of Ontario. The Innovation Institute of Ontario (IIO) is a not-for-profit business services provider supporting other not-for-profit organizations in Ontario and Canada. IIO was established in 2000 as a not-for-profit organization to provide grant management services and shared administrative support to the Ontario Innovation Trust and the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund.

Earlier this month, the OIT published a book on some of the innovative projects that the OIT funded in Ontario. Only 22 of the 1250 projects are highlighted in this book (and on the website). The website & book underscore the importance of investing in research to drive economic growth. I would highly recommend that we all take a look at this website & learn the lessons that are highlighted. If Canada is to compete economically and develop the next generation of jobs, then governments, policy makers and the private sector must invest in both pure and applied research. Not doing so will imperil our future.

The website & book contain some very interesting feature articles on public policy, solving the secrets of the universe, searching for gene based vaccines, amongst many other interesting articles.


It also contains "The 10 commandments to make the 21st-century Canada's century"...

1. We must give all our young people as much education as possible because to live in a brain-based economy requires that we exercise our grey matter.

2. We must reward education. We want to see the spectre of people with PhDs or medical or engineering degrees driving cabs or clearing plates to be an anathema. Brainless but worse, to be self-wounding. Education must be rewarded.

3. We must create a culture of excellence. Becoming the best is our only option.

4. We must have strong, independent, well-funded universities. We cannot compete in a worldwide knowledge economy if we don't provide the academic test beds to generate more knowledge.

5. University-based research must be the best in the world. But that means that university-based researchers are going to have to think about themselves in a 21st-century way. They have to ask themselves basic questions like: What can be made of this? How can this be applied? They must see themselves not as trains on a tenure track, not as intellectual high-wire artists trying only to impress their peers in the circus of academia, but as part of the innovation engine, as part of the future of Ontario's economy.

6. We must have entrepreneurs. No, that's not emphatic enough. We must have entrepreneurs! We must develop a sense that making new businesses, spinning off gold from research findings, is not a good. It is a great good, a paramount good, an our-destiny-and-our-hopes-for-the future good.We don't say greed is good; we say not making money from the fruits of our intelligence is senseless and self-defeating. It is an eternally crying eye.

7. We must provide entrepreneurs with intellectual property and technological transfer policies that allow them to be the best. Our academic institutions must understand it is both their job to patent new knowledge and their job to get out of the way of entrepreneurs who transfer intellectual property into commercial good.

8. Accordingly, university administrators and technological transfer officers must say to themselves: How do I get what this institution learned into the hands of someone who wants to make something of it? They must see this as a key part of their mission.

9. We must give rewards/recognition to those who risk, even if they fail.

10. This means government must ask itself every day before it closes for business: Have we supported knowledge-based industries today? How did our tax policies make us attractive to investors and entrepreneurs? Have we made it attractive for scientists who are thinking of coming to Ontario? Have we created a climate that will entice investors and make it easy to keep good managers? Are we becoming the best? And what did we do to make sure we were better than yesterday and will be better tomorrow?