Perspectives
Canada’s Innovation Culture
Canada's Innovation Culture may not be the problem people think it is. While many commentators claim that Canada lags behind the United States in its ability to innovate, we found no evidence of this in our recent study on corporate culture. Through a series of...
Canada’s R&D Expenditures – Losing Count
The Myth of Canadian Industry’s Poor R&D Performance Canada's R&D Expenditures have been underreported for quite some time. Numerous reports on Canada’s innovation economy have noted Canada’s poor record of private sector spending on research and development...
What’s with Ambiguity?
For some reason, I've had three conversations within the last few days, all on the subject of ambiguity. This isn't a concept that we talk about all the time so I have found it odd that I'm encountering it more on a daily basis. The first conversation was with a...
The death of logic and facts
As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that logic and facts don't matter. This is tremendously upsetting as I've grown up to favour the logical over the emotional. In fact I actually get turned on by facts. (Yes, how nerd-like can one be?) The death of Rob...
Ousting the Founder
Commentators have long criticized Canada’s inability to scale high-tech companies to world-class size. Could our habit of ousting the founder os scaling companies be the problem? According to the Centre for Digital Entrepreneurship + Economic Performance, “Canada...
Thinking Inside the Box – Attitudes to Innovation
If it isn’t enough that we lag Americans in innovation performance, this study will add to the Canadian national angst by showing that we as individuals also lag Americans in our attitudes to innovation. For this study, we have defined innovation as the process of...
Sitcom Startup Ideas
In a startup world full of ideas, it's difficult to separate the Sitcom Startup Ideas from the good ideas. I must admit that I didn't coin the phrase but am copying something that Paul Graham wrote in his post on How to Get Startup Ideas. To quote his post for those...
Where do good business ideas come from?
I'm doing a piece of research with U of T that looks at where good business ideas come from and it's making me look back at some of the very bad business ideas I've had over many years. It seems that age doesn't prevent me from having bad ideas. Several years ago I...
Extreme Value
I was thinking the other day about extreme value as a result of reading a blog about which retailers will survive when the middle class is eliminated. You can picture them. They are the Saks, Nordstrom, Tory Burch, Tiffany's, Versace and John Varvatos of the world....