Industry committee  It's a good question. I think that historically when we've talked about...and I go back to the information highway. There's been a lot of focus on building physical infrastructure. I think historically we've paid inadequate attention to building the skills infrastructure that we

Industry committee  You will not find a successful entrepreneur who hasn't had at least one failure. One of the things about building an innovative culture is giving people the freedom to fail. And that's a difficult thing for a lot of universities. That's part of the reason many of them have been r

Industry committee  What I would say is that at post-secondary institutions there are many pockets of innovation. There are many institutions across the country--too many to name--that are doing interesting and innovative things. What I would also say, however, is that many of the existing structu

Industry committee  I was just going to add that some of the new programs, like FedDev, are particularly valuable in promoting that sort of collaboration. We've certainly had huge benefits with our corporate partners in harnessing talent and innovation by accessing programs that really promote those

Industry committee  Yes. As I said at the outset, you definitely need an environment that doesn't impose impediments, and I don't disagree with that. But you also need people who aspire. One of the things that is often said about Canadian...we have lots of start-ups; they don't make it to the next l

Industry committee  Many people believe the Waterloo policy is the way to go at universities. At Ryerson, faculty and students retain their intellectual property except in cases where the university has invested significantly, in which case the university negotiates a share with the individual. But

Industry committee  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

Industry committee  Sure. There are a number of layers to my answer. The first is that the $80 million was great, and I think it was invested in the right something, which goes to my earlier point that a lot of the impediments, particularly in SMEs, are not actually hardware/software; it's understan

Industry committee  At this stage, we don't have a lot of disaggregated data. There was a project proposed with ITech, the Retail Council of Canada, and REALpac—a commercial real estate association that handles lots of the big shopping malls—to actually try to unpack that answer. One of the things

Industry committee  Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here today. Rather than reinforce some of the comments that have been made by the other panellists, I'd like to speak on behalf of Ryerson with respect to our view on innovation processes, on the role of universities in research and d