How did 3 university presidents get it wrong?

An article in the Globe and Mail over the holidays merits highlighting. “Southern Ontario should be an innovation cluster, not a farm team” was authored by Patrick Deane, Meric Gertler and Feridun Hamdullahpur, the president and vice-chancellor of McMaster University, the president of the University of Toronto and the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo respectively. In their article, the academic institutions’ leaders set out to describe a vision for a Southern Ontario innovation supercluster in the Toronto, Waterloo and Hamilton regions.

As they write, “Enabling higher rates of knowledge-intensive growth in an economy as diverse and complex as Southern Ontario’s requires a break from the status quo.”

So how do we realize this ecosystem’s full innovative potential, instead of continuing as a farm team? The right mix of investments and policies will spur us forward.

  • Invest in organizations that drive local economic development and quality of life, from civically minded governance bodies to cultural institutions.
  • Co-ordinate investments in research areas with both the highest success rates and strongest growth potential, from regenerative medicine to quantum science; from advanced materials to environmental technologies.
  • Ensure that our immigration rules make us a destination of choice for high-potential individuals.
  • Turn taxpayers into equity partners and give the public a share of the upside.
  • Support firms that can scale up by connecting them to successful mentors, addressing gaps in our venture financing systems and leveraging public procurement strategically.
  • Inculcate a culture of risk-taking that rewards rather than penalizes failure, that fosters adaptability and learning from mistakes.

Whoa! Are these folks serious? “Inculcate a culture of risk-taking that rewards rather than penalizes failure”. Tolerates failures, yes; accepts failures, yes; but, “rewards failures”? That sounds like our current system of government subsidies for failing aircraft industries (among others). Take taxes from successful companies and give handouts to failing companies.

“Turning taxpayers into equity partners” is an equally questionable approach. Governments typically do a notoriously bad job picking winners. Do we really think that crown corporations are the way to enable higher rates of knowledge-intensive growth?

Surely we can encourage risk-taking by tolerating failure without actually rewarding it. Our ultimate objective has to be building successful ventures. Our policies need to reward success, not failure. Do these universities give degrees to students who fail? My alma mater doesn’t.

The university presidents were correct that to enable a knowledge-intensive transition in Southern Ontario’s economy we need to break from the status quo. Unfortunately, their recommendations sound too much like more of the same old approach.

1 thought on “How did 3 university presidents get it wrong?”

  1. Thanks for the commentary Mark.
    I commend their ideals, and understand the ambition – the elusive ‘Silicon Valley North.’ There just aren’t any shortcuts to what would be a more complete social transformation to the entrepreneur economy they aspire to. They feel that the only missing ingredient is capitalization; in CA it’s is supplied by deep rooted investment community; if only we could get our hands on that kind of money! This is fallacy – it’s the social mythology of America, clarified and intensified in the Bay Area. A government cannot replace this with top-down directives that ‘failure is just a stepping stone to success’. A social transformation is much slower, and it’s under way. But how many spinoffs have arisen from RIM or Nortel or Corel. In Canada these become places to get a job. In US they become training grounds and motivation to do something different and better.

    Besides – how many more MaRs do they think we should do? I’m a sucker for the vision – sounds great! But they all end the same way. CANDU might be in same category. Govt can’t be in the business of learning from failure on public purse.

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