In contemporary economic development circles, there are few ideas more persistent or more poorly examined than the desire to recreate Silicon Valley. For over two decades, the world has watched a parade of billion-dollar unicorns prance out of Silicon Valley. In economic development circles, it’s now taken as gospel: if…
Category: Innovation and Technology
Innovation and Technology
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Build Something Massive (And Other Bad Ideas)
The motto of the Creative Destruction Lab – “Build something massive” – captures, perhaps a little too neatly, the central affliction of contemporary entrepreneurship: the conflation of magnitude with merit. “Massive” has become shorthand for ambition, but without qualifying what that mass is composed of- or directed toward – it…
Innovation and Technology
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“From now on we’ll be fighting only for power”: from social media to AI
“That means,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, smiling when the reading was over, “that all we’re fighting for is power.”“They’re tactical changes,” one of the delegates replied. “Right now the main thing is to broaden the popular base of the war. Then we’ll have another look.”One of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s political…
Innovation and Technology
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AI + Quantum Computing = Fear-Driven Innovation
In the grand theatre of modern technological ambition, Silicon Valley increasingly resembles a solution in frantic pursuit of a problem. Quantum computing is a case in point: the race to break RSA encryption is a global sprint that all seems a bit unnecessary. RSA may not be perfect, but it…
Innovation and Technology
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Canadian innovation doesn’t need more money: it needs a brilliant vision
An article published this month in Science and Public Policy makes the startling claim that “between 74 and 90 per cent of total spending on support for business research and development (R&D) each year since 2000” has been distributed not as one would expect by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and…
Innovation and Technology
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Ontario needs a fresh approach to boost startup investing and close its innovation gap (published by yours truly in the Globe and Mail 2018)
Link to Globe and Mail website: Ontario needs a fresh approach to boost startup investing and close its innovation gap – The Globe and Mail Seven years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing over Ontario’s heavily service-based economy and the “innovation gap.” In the flush of promise-making that preceded…