Arvind Gupta
The acrimony and enigma of Arvind Gupta’s exit from UBC
How the sudden resignation of UBC’s president has widened into an ugly faculty revolt and PR disaster
Where you need to go in this town for a good idea
Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.
Where you need to go in Ottawa for a good idea
How to attract human capital and find a place for science students in industry