We did a book a few years ago called Innovation Nation: Canadian Leadership from Java to Jurassic Park, which looked at high-tech entrepreneurs. The strongest predictor of whether someone will be a serial entrepreneur is whether they come from a family of entrepreneurs, and that could be a real estate agent, a farmer, or a self-employed physician.
If you understand that, then you recognize that the structure of the Canadian economy is not actually working in our favour, because large employers account for the majority of jobs. So you have to think about what you can do in the educational system to create the kinds of sensibility, the risk-taking, and the aptitudes that are going to drive entrepreneurship. I mean that not just in the context of business, but also in the context of social entrepreneurship, and I actually think we need a strategy that looks at K to 12 as well as the universities and all the way through.
Some people have mentioned the digital media zone at Ryerson; any of you are welcome to come. It is a space that the president created for students. It's led by students and run by students: space, technology, and let them go. Over 18 months they've created 47 start-ups and 240 jobs and basically have turned experiential learning and approaches to innovation on their head. This is a generation that knows more about technology and its potential than we do--I speak for myself, not for everyone in the room.
Some of the programs already established at the provincial and federal levels give young people the opportunities and the experience they need to enhance their employability, but also give them the confidence they need to venture out on their own and create their own jobs. I think this is critically important.
I think there are huge opportunities there that we're not tapping into. Reverse mentoring is one, whereby young people teach older people how to use social media. It's low cost and it creates huge opportunities.
At Ryerson, that's part of what we think is very important.