Let's Teach Innovation

Canada can help close the productivity gap with the U.S. by breaking down the distinction between research and education.

The productivity gap between Canada and the U.S. has been receiving a lot of press. Each worker in the U.S. produces about $8 more of goods value per hour than their Canadian counterpart. The question that wets the lips of managers and economists everywhere is, “How do we 'fix' this gap?”

Why is an astrophysicist writing about this issue? I'm happy to say I have some experience in the corporate world having spent a year working for the merchant bank J. P. Morgan. I met some spectacularly capable individuals and saw examples of teamwork that impressed me no end. At the same time I also saw some expense claims and projects that wasted money in really quite shocking ways. Still, I came away from this experience with new-found respect and understanding for the corporate world.

Most commentators focus on two key ways of improving productivity: develop new goods to sell at higher prices, or become more efficient at producing goods or doing business. For a long time both of these issues have been tied to “innovation.” But recently, Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management, has suggested we should consider only the second of these as innovation, and the first as invention. His thesis is that Canada has concentrated too much on invention.

It's certainly an interesting argument, and my immediate reaction was to see how the statistics support it. So I headed to the Conference Board of Canada's website. The numbers are unfortunately out of date, from 2007, but we'll have to make do.

Martin suggests we've concentrated too much on scientific research. Is this true? Out of 17 OECD countries we rank 8th in the number of scientific articles per million population. There isn't actually much to choose between the countries lying 5-8th. This gets us a B grade. Curiously, Japan ranks last. The U.S. sits one place below us.

But what about a real measure of invention – patents per million of population. Here we rank 14th, a D grade, while Japan comes in 2nd. The U.S. sits right in the middle again, quite a bit above Canada. In the productivity rankings Japan is actually below Canada, so there's no obvious trend here. Indeed, I'm quite wary of all these numbers because there is a lot of clustering and year-to-year variation. There is clearly much to be learnt about how knowledge based economies work, and even more about how they relate to productivity. So at this point, I'm very skeptical of Martin's claims, and I need to read more.

But my real reason for being interested in this topic relates to an issue much closer to home for me, namely the governmental distinction between research (often funded from federal sources) and education (the constitutional domain of the provinces). I believe this schism is directly hindering our ability to teach and train our students on the latest research equipment and directly contributes to our “innovation gap.”

All commentators seem to agree that creating innovation requires good education systems. I concur, even though I'm compelled to point out my obvious self-interest. By bringing research as close to the classroom as we can, we will ensure our students leave with the latest knowledge and the best training. I'm not just talking about Martin's idea of “invention” here either. This is about new ways of thinking and new techniques that can be carried over to business. Programming techniques developed for astrophysics that wound up being applied to oil and gas reservoir simulation is one example.

So why don't our advances filter into the classroom more efficiently? Here's one issue: it's a grey area as to whether any equipment purchased with partial funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (federal funding) can be used in teaching. CFI policy states that infrastructure used in teaching is an ineligible cost. So many universities play things safe and only let graduate courses use these facilities. This means that I can't give undergraduates experience programming on massively parallel supercomputers. Neither can I teach them in our data visualization facility called the “DataCAVE.” Similarly facilities are now widely used in, surprise, surprise, the oil and gas sector.

This is not good for our students, or for our society. I'm sure our undergraduates feel a small sense of resentment that they are kept away from some of the best facilities. Arguments that they might somehow “waste them” don't hold true when you are working in a supervised teaching environment.

I'm asking for structured access for our students to important, tax-payer funded resources.

The education-research distinction also shows up in the policies of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council. A number of scientists have been calling for NSERC to introduce a “broader impacts” section on research proposals. This requirement forces scientists to put their results in a wider context through outreach programs. The National Science Foundation in the U.S. has made this a component of their application process for years, although it is not without controversy. Personally, I've seen a number of fantastic proposals for disseminating research more efficiently, from movies explaining scientific results to classes for business majors in the scientific discovery process.

Yet NSERC takes the view that outreach is too close to education. There have even been “off the record” comments that they are advised to take a hands-off approach for legal reasons. Jokingly, sometimes I wonder if taking this policy to its logical end would mean I should not publish the results of my NSERC-funded research – journals are educational after all!

Fixing this problem is difficult. Federal-provincial boundaries are deeply embedded in Canadian politics. It is even unfashionable to suggest this structure hurts the country sometimes. Nonetheless, if we could bridge the legal gaps between research and teaching that would be a great step.

I want to conclude with a word of caution. Modern businesses seem to work on an exceptionally short timescale – the quarterly report. Strategic business plans looking five years out are rarely considered. Markets change too fast. But education and research bear their fruit on much longer timescales. A degree takes four years. Research can take sometimes take 20 or more years to have a dramatic economic payback. Change in these areas take time, but has great value.

We need to ensure that funding changes we make to fix today's problems don't make the well of invention run dry tomorrow.