Ottawa’s latest and most comprehensive answer to a question that has bedevilled governments for years — Why aren’t Canadian firms more innovative? — is already off to a rocky start.

The latest federal budget devotes 21 pages to the issue of innovation and productivity, describing the failure in stark terms and proposing a slew of changes that refocuses the venerable National Research Council and reshuffles how about $12 billion in annual research and development funds are doled out.

But corporate Canada, which will ultimately determine if the fix will work, is expressing doubt and bewilderment.

Robert Slezak retired from TD Ameritrade in his early 40s, his pocket full of the financial rewards of helping a small company grow into a national leader in the investment industry.

Today he's still helping figure out business strategies, keeping an eye on business finances and interacting with top executives. But he's also apt to take phone calls from a beach in Florida, not at an office. When it comes to the heavy lifting of running a business, that's somebody else's job.

The Chant

KU's world famous Rock Chalk Chant evolved from a cheer that a chemistry professor, E.H.S. Bailey, created for the KU science club in 1886.

Bailey's version was "Rah, Rah, Jayhawk, KU" repeated three times. The rahs were later replaced by "Rock Chalk," a transposition of chalk rock, the name for the limestone outcropping found on Mount Oread, site of the Lawrence campus.

The cheer became known worldwide. Teddy Roosevelt pronounced it the greatest college chant he'd ever heard. Legend has it that troops used the chant when fighting in the Philippines in 1899, in the Boxer Rebellion in China, and in World War II. At the Olympic games in 1920, the King of Belgium asked for a typical American college yell. The assembled athletes agreed on KU's Rock Chalk and rendered it for His Majesty.

You can hear the chant here.

I am constantly meeting professionals who boast about their “network” or Rolodex, and promise that they can connect me to just about anyone. They say that if I look at their LinkedIn connections and see someone who could help me, they’ll “try” to make an introduction. The funny thing is that most of these so-called connectors have a list (huge ones, in some cases) of connections they barely know. It could be someone they met at a networking function for 30 seconds, or someone who found their profile interesting and wanted to “connect.”

Anyone who makes this kind of offer (especially if you make it easy for them to recommend you) is still adding more potential value than someone who makes no offer at all – but there’s an important caveat: you have to do the work. And there is a real possibility that you will invest a lot of time scanning their contacts only to find out that they barely know the person you want to meet.

Google's got a penchant for snapping up startups just when they're getting going (extreme case in point: YouTube). About six months ago, the company reaffirmed its support for fledgling tech companies with the announcement that it had leased a huge, seven-story building near London's Silicon Roundabout that would serve as a launchpad for London-based startups. Six months on, Google is opening the doors to the building it's calling 'Campus.'

arlier this month the Guardian Higher Education Network posted the first of four instalments in its series exploring knowledge mobilisation past, present and future.

My first piece introduced knowledge mobilisation as a new university-based research service that connects academic social sciences and humanities (SSH) research to non-academic decision makers, so that SSH research informs decisions about public policy and professional practice. In this second instalment I'm going to reflect on the past – on the roots of knowledge mobilisation.

Live next to a Caribbean beach all year round, anywhere in the world….” The Chilean company Crystal Lagoons has succeeded in making this long overused dream cliche into reality by finding a way to treat the water in swimming pools hundreds of meters in size.

The meteoric success of the holiday home complex built in 2007 around the “biggest swimming pool in the world” has prompted unparalleled excitement from property developers across the globe. The success of the complex is due in large part to Crystal Lagoons’ place in the Guinness Book of World Records after opening the largest swimming pool in the world in San Alfonso del Mar, a small town along the Pacific coast rather lacking in charm about 100 kilometers from Santiago.

In sports, mental toughness is defined as the ability to focus on and execute solutions, especially in the face of adversity. If anyone in business ever needed mental toughness, it’s an entrepreneur. Investors tell me that startup success is all about execution, all while facing determined competitors and overcoming customers’ resistance to change.

Dr. Jason Selk, in his most recent book “Executive Toughness,” talks about mental toughness with analogies between sports and business, but he never takes it all the way to entrepreneurs, where I believe it can have the most impact. So here is my interpretation of the fundamentals he outlines, adapted to the language of a startup:

Define the win for your business. A startup is not a parlor game. With a for-profit startup, it’s all about solving a problem that embodies real pain, for real customers who are willing and able to pay for a solution. For social entrepreneurs, it’s all about making the world a better place. Figure out early what it takes to win, or you will lose by default.

With all the talk about funding rounds, exits, and acquisitions, everyone assumes entrepreneurs are riding around in fancy cars and flying off in their private jets.

But that's not the case.

They usually are working from when they get up, to when they go to sleep.

Many entrepreneurs are underpaid, hoping that their labor will pay off.

And, due to the high cost of living in San Francisco, their quality of life isn't that good.

INTERTRADEIRELAND: THE CREATION of an interconnected innovation web comprising all of the various actors, including third-level institutions, consumers, scientists, government agencies, entrepreneurs, financiers and technologists, where the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts, is the vision of InterTradeIreland.

“A more open model of innovation is needed to help firms develop concepts and take them to market,” says InterTradeIreland strategy and policy director, Aidan Gough.

Chalk one up for continental Europe’s economic architects. For the past several decades, the Anglo-Saxon consensus was that state interference in the private-sector economy was a mistake. Government bureaucrats were in no position to pick economic winners and losers — and if standing aside meant letting the forces of creative destruction sweep away entire industries, so be it.

The continental Europeans, most successfully the Germans, demurred. They were unconvinced that the shift from manufacturing to services was either good or inevitable, and they used the full might of the state to try to hang on to their industrial base. The financial crisis may have briefly felt like a vindication of this model — but the near collapse and continued frailty of the euro brought a quick end to that moment of schadenfraude.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - On March 30, the University of Maryland launches its expanding lineup of competitions and activities devoted to innovation, ingenuity and ideas: 30 Days of EnTERPreneurship. Nearly a quarter-million dollars in prizes will be awarded at six events involving UMD faculty, students and alums.

The events honor the best in entrepreneurship at all stages of innovation - from invention to business plans to start-ups. Celebrants will include Gov. Martin O'Malley and one of Maryland's most successful entrepreneurs, Kevin Plank '96, founder and CEO of Under Armour.

The competitions reach across campus and align with UMD's growing commitment to a university-wide culture of entrepreneurship and its strategic priority of creating 100 new companies over the next decade.

Despite recent signs of recovery in the labor market, there are still more than 12 million unemployed job seekers. So how do we explain the fact that some positions stay open for months? And why are some companies struggling to find the right people for open positions in their area?

The growing skills gap provides one explanation, but another clue is the significant downward trend in workforce mobility. Fewer people are looking (or are able to look) beyond their own backyards for a new job. Last fall, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the percentage of Americans who changed residences between 2010 and 2011 — 11.6 percent — reached its lowest recorded rate since they started keeping track in 1948, down from 20.2 percent in 1985.

Back in the 1880’s, Frederick Winslow Taylor was able to make dramatic gains in efficiency by timing workers performing rote tasks.  His efforts spawned the idea and practice of scientific management.

Alas, these days routine jobs, even white collar ones such as bookkeeping, legal research and basic medical diagnoses are increasingly being automated by computer.  Others fall prey to globalization and are outsourced.

So to compete in today’s marketplace, you have to be able to create. That’s much different than just working faster or harder or longer.  The good news is that, while we can’t all be a Picasso or a Mozart, there are some simple principles we can follow that will enhance our ability originate ideas that are truly new and important.

I spend a lot of time marketing my business. To be heard over the ‘online noise’ and reach a lot of relevant people throughout the world is a trying challenge. It requires much more than banner ads and press releases.

While I am learning about all the things that possibly work with online marketing, it seems that doing things “well” require me to be creative at all times.  However, every once in a while, a lot of us get the ‘creative-block.’ Or is it just me? Here are a few things that I do, to get inspiring ideas that move the dial:

No matter how privatized healthcare is in America, at the end of the day it remains a social sustainability issue and a government concern. That’s why America’s newly minted CTO Todd Park is sparking health care innovation and reform through liberation of data from the vaults of NIH, FDA, CMS, USDA, CDC and other government health agencies.  Park believes that de-centralization and data liberation leads to empowerment and innovation.  In this interview at the Healthcare Experience Design Conference in Boston, Park outlines his initiatives to catalyze the ecosystem of health services by unlocking data.

Prior to being appointed the CTO of America to the White House, Park was a successful health IT entrepreneur who co-founded Athenahealth and Castlight, then served as the CTO at Health and Human Services (HHS). His Health Data Initiative (HDI) is mandating that HHS agency data be publicly accessible in machine readable format using APIs.

The Canadian dollar is worth as much as the U.S. greenback. But Canadians are abuzz about something else entirely: plastic money.

Last November, Canada introduced a plastic $100 bill, becoming one of about three dozen countries that have replaced at least some paper banknotes with bills printed on polymer. Beginning Monday, the Bank of Canada will begin circulating $50 bills made of the same material, and smaller denominations will follow next year.

What determines innovation success? In recent years, we learned that it is not necessarily the underlying technology or the innovation’s value proposition. More and more, we came to realize that the innovation ecosystem, the interdependent partner network needed to generate, develop and deliver a technology-based or business-model innovation can be the ultimate defining factor. With the source of differentiation shifting from the innovative technology core to the partner network, business leaders must now understand how to build and play their innovation ecosystem.

Examples abound. The iPhone’s success has probably more to do with its ecosystem of content producers and consumers than to its hardware, looks or appealing browsing features. Illustrating the interdependency aspect of ecosystems, application developers also are better off choosing this particular ecosystem as opposed to another one because of the guaranteed customer potential it offers. Also, as an example of how a car-applicable modular technological innovation could become a new market disruption, the electrical car will remain a green niche solution or we will keep on driving hybrid cars until we have a reliable, omnipresent electricity-providing ‘fuel’ station network

Stanford-based expert Burton Lee, who specialises in European entrepreneurship, said Europe lacked impact assessment methodologies critical for attracting venture capital investment and forecasting the number of jobs that could be created.

Lee referred to the employment impact estimated for the EU's proposed 'Horizon 2020' R&D programme, saying the Commission had estimated it at 3.7 million jobs by 2025. He then questioned whether this forecast was credible without “pipeline analyses” to track the number of start-ups in a given sector from inception to failure or success.

Lee was invited to address the European Parliament's industry and research committee on March 21.

Prepared by: Robert Merson, March 29, 2012

Strengthening and leveraging the private sector as a key player in advancing innovation was a primary theme of the Canadian federal budget, presented March 29, 2012. The announcement to eliminate the penny from Canadian currency was also a point of interest.

Existing funding programs received increased investment, a total of $37M across the tri- councils and $60M for Genome Canada. The National Research Council was provided with $67M to support the transition from an institute model over to a program model.

Industry will benefit from a doubling of IRAP investment to $110M per year and the investment of $500M in venture capital. Changes to the SR&ED’s program will ultimately generate a savings of $35M per year as a result of a lower eligible rate of claim

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