Monday, June 30, 2008

Canada Rocks the World in Education, Sucks in Innovation

According to some sort of economic study. Kind of a weird combination. We produce a lot of educated graduates but don't give them anything useful to do. Most recent university graduates can probably relate to this...

Also the study points out that the only thing saving our asses right now is a natural resource boom (ie oil):

"Canada is losing ground to other countries that are better at exploiting their own advantages," writes the board's president, Anne Golden. "We appear to be riding high due to global demand for our resources, but this is not a sustainable course for our country."


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just taking a wild stab at this, do you think promoting innovation by providing an incentive for people to remain in country would be a good idea? Perhaps providing an incubator-like environment where they can try out new business ideas without tremendous regulatory overhead?

Anonymous Coward said...

From talking to biotech CEOs, I get the sense that regulation / taxation is good in Canada, the main hurdle is VC money. There are just not enough people with the kind of money to make this happen, so the companies are forced to move south to survive.

Bayman said...

@Gunn,

I think this would probably be a good idea. I think there's a lot of potential to target the PhD graduate population and utilize them better. By providing better-than-post-doc alternatives within country...Not just by providing R&D infrastructure by but addressing issues that concern the PhD grad as an individual as well - like salaries, quality of life, housing, family life etc, etc.

Michael said...

Well,

I can't say much about this because I don't have enough information about it.

Student of Canadian college