CANADA: Universities not preparing innovation talent

Canada's push to foster innovation lacks a national strategy for producing the talented innovators who will drive the country's knowledge-based economy, said Canadian educators attending the World Innovation Summit for Education, WISE, in Qatar earlier this month.

"Other countries are clearly thinking about how to prepare graduates to be entrepreneurial and succeed in the global economy," said Dr Deborah Buszard, a professor at Dalhousie University's college of sustainability.

While initiatives such as Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships and Canada Research Chairs represent federal efforts to intervene, Canadian universities are not "preparing the talent coming up through the system", she said.

Canada's innovation strategy was recently analysed in a major review of research and development spending titled Innovation Canada: A call to action.

The federal government report, authored by an independent panel of industry and academic leaders including University of Toronto President David Naylor, was concerned with why business innovation in Canada lags behind other developed countries despite its highly educated and diverse workforce, natural resources, attractive corporate tax rates and institutions supporting research.

Among other recommendations, the panel suggested establishing an industrial research and innovation council and transforming institutes of the National Research Council into large-scale research and development centres involving the business and university sectors.

What is missing from the review of research and development spending, according to Buszard, is a national strategy for producing graduates prepared to succeed in the global economy.

"There is a lot of talk about supporting the talent that will generate innovation, but the funnel is not connected to anything," she said. "Resources aren't what is going to drive innovation. The only thing that matters is the brains."

The report acknowledges that Canada's innovation gap is partly an education gap. While Canada ranks first in the OECD for post-secondary participation rates, it falls in the middle of the pack in bachelor degree graduates and near the bottom in doctoral graduates.

Because the earnings advantage of highly educated people is less pronounced in Canada than in the United States, up to a fifth of doctoral candidates plan to leave the country after graduation, according to Statistics Canada.

"When they go, these graduates take with them knowledge and skills that could contribute to a more innovative and prosperous future for Canada," the panelists wrote.

Buszard believes the education system needs to shift focus from teaching content to developing students' capacities to understand, synthesise and make use of information.

"We still need to give students disciplinary expertise, but they also need the much broader skills of entrepreneurship, flexibility and understanding of the economy. Students need the perspective to think about the links between their creative output and industry."

For Ron Canuel, CEO of the Canadian Education Association, attending WISE with delegates from more than 120 countries made apparent one reason why Canada is resistant to education reform: "Developing countries are more open to change because they aren't stuck with a successful pre-existing system," he said.

Bold thinking about how curriculum is delivered is necessary, according to Buszard. "This can't be an add-on course in final year, but a cultural change throughout the education system," she said.

"Knowledge is now effectively free. Students come to class to listen to a professor lecture on all the knowledge in his head. Now students have more information in their iPhone. They can instantaneously access a more up-to-date paper than the professor has read."