One of my favourite business researchers, Dean Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business, explodes another myth in today's Globe and Mail. In a direct attack on the venerable Bill Gates, Martin says Canada doesn't need to graduate more technology students. No, what we need more of is business students.

I've attended a number of presentations by Roger Martin over the past few years and one of his dominant themes is the debunking of media "superstitions" concerning the economy. The technology education myth is another one.

Bill Gates propagated that myth when he argued in the Globe that the secret to American economic dominance rests in the number of technologists that country produces. Not so argues Martin. Then he gets out the stats. The financial services sector alone in the U.S. is 67% larger than the high-tech sector. Wages are 18% higher.

According to Martin, Canada produces 11% more science and engineering students per capita than the United States. But we are not proportionately more competitive. Where Canada doesn't eclipse the U.S. is in the production of business students. In the U.S. a full 21% of students in universities are in business courses. Canada, on the other hand, restricts its business school enrollment. We produce just 57% per capita of the U.S. business graduates.

Here is how Martin ends his story:

From the narrow perspective of the software industry, Mr. Gates may see the obvious prescription for Canada. However, if we discipline ourselves to look at the facts rather than superstitions, we will head in a dramatically different direction than that advocated by the science and technology lobby's most prominent member.

My experience backs Martin's position. Think about it. Canada has great researchers and engineers. We produce remarkable products that, more and more, have to go outside the country to (...read more...)

Want to know what it takes to be innovative in your company? here is Bob Sutton's personal advice:

I talked about what I’ve learned about teaching people to innovate from academic research, teaching classes in the d.school and Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and from working with companies like IDEO, HP, and SAP. I emphasized five points and their implications for policy. I doubt that many of you will be surprised by any of these ideas, but knowing is not the same is doing. Few of these practices are used at the university level – not just in the AER, throughout the world. Here are the five points:

1 Producing smart individuals is the first step; teaching them to collaborate is the second step.

2 Teach people how to fight as if they are right and listen as if they are wrong.

3. Teach experts to seek out novices, and novices to seek out experts.

4. Teach people to treat innovation as an import-export business.

5. Teaching people how to succeed isn’t enough; teach them how to fail too.

I also added that renowned innovators – from Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs – not only have good ideas, they also always seem to be able to sell their ideas or to hook-up with people who can do it for them.

I like point 4. Too many of us don't understand the economic value of innovation. Shifting mental gears to consider it as an exportable product may be a good first step to overcoming that inertia.

For anyone in the financial community who is interested in the potential of what Don Tapscott calls "Wikinomics," this weekend saw the Toronto technology community embrace the collaboration form to generate new ideas for the TTC's obsolete website. The one day event -- held at the popular Gladstone Hotel on Queen Street West -- brought together the TTC's top brass including Chair Adam Giambrone and Commissioner Joe Mihevic with some very smart and enthusiastic brainstorming participants.

Organized by many of the people who bring the city its successful BarCamp and DemoCamp Wiki-organized gatherings (David Crow - thanks), the Toronto Transit Camp is a case study in how the "Wisdom of Crowds" phenomenon can be applied to difficult problems.

In his opening remarks to camp participants Jay Goldman, of Radiant Core, said the day would provide answers to these three questions:

How do we improve the dialogue between ttc and its ridership?

How do we apply the BarCamp group problem-solving model to other problems?

How do we build bridges between different creative communities in the city?

The day's events provided answers to the first question. It seems everyone left on a high knowing that they'd contributed to improving the city and "Bettering the Better Way." Mark Kuznicki, of ReMarkk Consulting, framed the day's events as an approach or system that can be used to tackle city-related issues. Here is an excerpt from Mark's blog:

This was an experiment in bringing BarCamp event practices, social media and online collaboration tools and community stewardship practices to the rest of the world - the real world. Web 2.0 obsessed technologists (this means you DemoCamp) often forget that technology is a means, not an end. Transit Campers were challenged to become city-builders and at the end of the day an amazing new community was born armed (...read more...)

Gagglescape's sister blog is http://www.corporateknightsforum.com. We have a series from the Davos World Economic Forum Conference that you may enjoy.

By Toby Heaps: Editor of Corporate Knights magazine which publishes the annual Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations list each year at the World Economic Forum.

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Environment themes and their relationship with the economy, particularly climate change, are hot this year in Davos.

Case in point. Last night I was waiting outside the Belvedere, the main Davos Hotel where the glitterati gather at night. As I was running a little late and it was quite a long line to get inside the hotel through the security check, I wondered if anyone would notice if I budded a little. But when I noticed that the Premier of Quebec was waiting behind me in the cold line, my better instincts suggested that was not a good idea, especially in Switzerland.

The Premier and I were both heading for similar events. He was off to speak on a panel with UK Conservative Leader David Cameron on climate change and energy security, and I had a dinner to co-host. I was looking forward to the dinner for two reasons: to hear what the world’s leading investment bankers had to say on taking the good fight (climate change, human rights) to the political stage, and I was curious how the red-blooded Wall Street crowd (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Swiss Re) would appreciate the 100 per cent vegetarian-meal I had ordered for all of them.

It turned out that the hi-carb but low-carbon veggie-lasagna was a big hit, but my dinner conversation was interrupted when a senior Canadian aluminum company executive had to go outside to answer questions from a newspaper survey on whether his company supported the Kyoto Protocol and what they were doing about it. (...read more...)

For Gagglescape.com readers who just can't get enough of Apple's new products, we have this fan video from New York. Apologies in advance to James Blunt fans:

Arstechnica.com has an interesting story about NBC's VP of Digital Innovation, Sab Kanaujia, and his on-again, off-again post on what NBC Universal is going to do to compete with upstart media companies YouTube and MySpace. It turns out that Kanaujia did not want to spill the beans so the post got pulled - except, it didn't. Thanks to Google cache:

It won't surprise anyone that my team at NBC Universal Digital Media is currently leading a major social networking initiative. I guess every online media firm is doing something in this area. We know we're already late. But unlike Fox, our approach has been different.

Instead of buying an existing social networking destination (Digital Media evaluated some candidates back in the summer before I joined the team), the decision was made to internally build the platform grounds up - we do have a few 3rd party partners to give us a jump start. The decision not to buy was mainly due to integration challenges and the inability of most of 3rd party social networking destinations to scale, a key aspect for a large media firm like ours.

Okay, we've all done this - hit the submit button only to realize we forgot to spell check or fact check or . . . In this case, we can guess that people at NBC did not want their tactics to reach the competition. That's the problem when blogs become the stream-of-consciousness tools they were meant to be, people say things that would never see the light of day in the print world. But that's fine. The transparency of ideas is building a momentum of entrepreneurship that will launch the next economic golden age; or, maybe it will destroy us. I wonder what Kanaujia thinks.

Many in the business community believe in Malcolm Gladwell's maxim, "Don't think--blink!" When a CEO of a company is well-versed in the issues and functions of their company, often decisions have to be made on a moments notice. Having insight in how to make better snap decisions can make the difference between success or failure.

Gladwell's book, Blink, was partially based on science and partially on anecdotal evidence. Yesterday, the BBC ran a science story that adds legitimacy to his argument. Researchers have determined that in some situations people make better decisions in a fraction of a second than they do when given time to study a problem:

Ten volunteers were shown a computer screen covered in over 650 identical symbols, including one rotated version of the symbol.

They were asked to decide which side of the screen the rotated image was on.

Given a fraction of a second to look at the screen, the subjects were 95% accurate.

But when they were allowed to scrutinize the image for over a second, they were only 70% accurate.

Dr Li Zhaoping, of UCL's Department of Psychology said: "This finding seems counter-intuitive.

All of this goes a long way in supporting those successful people who credit their success to so-called intuition. That is a very human trait: when we don't know the reason for something we assign it to a category that embraces the undefined.

The truth is we can prepare ourselves to make good, fast decisions. It is called hard work and preparation. Welcome to the future -- and the past.

It is that time of the year again: time to look back over the last 365 days, admire your accomplishments, cringe at your failures and plan for the new year.

Did you learn anything in 2006? Do you have what it takes to succeed in '07 or are you and your team ready for a hard landing? Business 2.0 is offering advice from 50 well-known, successful people. Gagglescape.com brings you eleven of the best. These are people who recognize that successful businesses need people power and innovative ideas in order to rise to the top. How do you get innovative? Take a look at my story on the key lessons of innovation. After you've done that read through what these eleven success stories have to offer:

Sergey Brin
Co-founder, Google
SUCCEED WITH SIMPLICITY

Chris DeWolfe
Co-founder, Myspace
KEEP SOCIAL NETWORKS SOCIAL

Chad Hurley
Co-founder, YouTube
GIVE YOUR STARTUP A FIGHTING CHANCE

1. Test first. Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

2. Seek outside feedback. As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

3. Give partners what they want. Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs. An interesting example is what we've done with the music labels. With Warner and others, (...read more...)

What started as a hobby for lawyer Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, a Web 2.0 blog, is now so profitable he's taking time away to think about what the future might hold (Gagglescape aspires to such a fate). The San Francisco Gate has the story.

In the 18 months since he started the blog, Arrington has emerged as a major player in a tech scene that is quickly changing the media landscape. Bloggers, using inside information and posting at all hours of the day and night, are often beating traditional media to big stories and are setting the news agenda from Silicon Valley to Washington.

Last night's attendants of the MIT Enterprise Forum got to see what makes a company stand out. Touted as Canada's IPO success of 2006, Evertz Technologies went public with a $67 million offering in June of this year. They now boast a market cap of one billion dollars. How did they do it when every other IPO of the season seemed to stall from a lack of interest? The big answer is through exceptional execution by a talented management team. But as we all know, big answers are made up of hundreds of smaller, critical details.

Brian Campbell, the EVP of Business Development for Evertz, is a details guy. Trained as an engineer, he has an MBA and years of experience in Toronto's financial community. More than that, he has the ability to understand the numerous functions that come together to create success. He shared his insight with the audience last night. Campbell explained how Evertz took a $2 million dollar a year company to $150 million in eight short years. It was not luck. The team executed with clinical efficiency on the key factors behind their growth: Engineering, self-financiing, innovation, and team-building.

I'll write more about this remarkable story later in the day.

Update: Let's take a brief look at how the management at Evertz took a series of small steps over time that resulted in building a very successful company. Campbell explained that in 1997 two former Leitch Technology employees identified an opportunity to buy a stable, 30 plus year old tech company with about 17 employees. At the time, they surveyed the market horizon and decided that high-definition television - HDTV - was going to be a big industry once governments settled on regulatory standards. Thus they began focusing their company's products towards HDTV. Smart move.

WIth support (...read more...)

If you haven't had the opportunity to attend the MIT Enterprise Forum yet, then this Wednesday's scheduled topic is a good reason to come. Event coordinator Mark Lawrence of North Crest Partners writes this update today:

Look at Today's National Post - Financial Post for Cover Story on
Evertz Technologies - IPO Success of 2006 - The Story of How This Company Achieved A Successful IPO without ever needing outside VC funding - A Business Case Presentation and Panel Discussion

Back by popular demand is our Business Case Study with Brian Campbell EVP Business Development of Evertz talking about the trials and tribulations of how Evertz, now with a $1 billion market cap, became a world leading provider of equipment to the broadcasting industry. Join Brian and our three leading industry panelists to hear them talk about and critique, question and examine the path that Evertz has taken. The event is interactive with participation and questions from the audience most welcome.

We also have a guest mini presentation by the Ontario Centres of Excellence about the resources it provides entrepreneurs.

The Toronto Chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum is one of 24 worldwide. We invite participation from alumni of any institution. You do not need to be an MIT Grad or be invited by one. We are a not-for-profit organization designed to be a forum and networking event for technology entrepreneurs, investors and service providers.




Register today at: https://alum.mit.edu/smarTrans/user/Register.dyn?eventID=7737&groupID=921

This video was shot at a Web 2.0 conference in Ireland. Canter gives a four minute overview of Web 2.0's end game.

The synergism of social-networking and the Net are just now beginning to gel. This short video provides a glimpse into where market forces are taking us.

I am on my way to New York to present at an urban design and sustainability symposium hosted by the United Nations.

I decided to take the only mass transit option to get to the airport rather than take a cab. I hiked to the TTC subway station and had a relatively easy 23 minute ride to Kipling station. Then things got funky. Instead of the 192 "Express" bus arriving on time, it was ten minutes late. One normal city bus connects the subway to Canada's biggest airport. It runs every twenty minutes. Sort of. There wasn't room for one additional passenger and their bags when the bus left.

Can you imagine if London, England or Paris offered similar system? Not easily. This is why Porter Air is allowed to exist. people have no faith in our public infrastructure and, if today's experience is an indication, it is understandable.

Think of how fewer taxis would be polluting our air if we could do something as simple as having a real express bus system leaving the Kipling station every five minutes. It would be an inexpensive solution to a grave problem. Even if it cost $5 more I know many people would pay if, only if, they could depend on it.

This Thursday evening I am moderating a panel (see Sunday's posting) with some local politicians. While the panel is not about our transit system per, it is about community development. Without a sustainable, effective transit system community development in our city will always be an illusion no matter how well-considered.

OK, if I sometime come across as being critical of the Canadian VC industry it is only because A) I am a somewhat frustrated entrepreneur, and B) I don't have to make the same decisions they have to make with other people's money.

Malcom Gladwell has a brief posting on his blog about the concept of "Degree of Difficulty." In essence it is about an insider's view of a situation versus an outsider's view. Good reading and it prompted me to give a hats-off to Brightspark and JLA Ventures this morning.

Sorry for the pun but the unstoppable Sean Wise offered Gagglescape.com this short video clip on the do's and don'ts of elevator pitching. It is a worthwhile 1:30 seconds long so take it away Sean . . .