Month: September 2009

Categories
Policy Shaping Collaborations Post Secondary Education

MQ Summary of BCBC Summit: Part 3

Innovation and BC’s 2020 Economy.  A great topic and well-covered by the third session — a panel discussion entitled:  Tomorrow’s Technology Today:  Innovation and BC’s 2020 Economy.

The final panel of the summit was well moderated by a pro — Dr. David Turpin, President of the University of Victoria.   Dr. Turpin started off the session with a succinct summary of the report that he and some colleagues authored for the BCBC on Universities and the Knowledge Economy (http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Turpin.pdf) which emphasizes the important role that graduate students can play in the research team –especially their role in knowledge transfer.

Which led into comments from the founder of MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) Arvind Gupta — Dr. Math (those of you who read the Vancouver Sun will remember the great series on the importance of math — and Arvind’s approach to helping parents (and students) learn to love math).  But Arvind was on the panel to talk about what it takes to build a knowledge economy — basically knowledge workers.  And what we need to do to make BC attractive to the best possible students from around the globe.

MITACS operates a kind of “dating service” between research programs/students and industry.  It matches up graduate student expertise with identified problems from industry.  Money is matched and the outcome is often a job in the end for the student.  The Provincial government put in $10million into the internship program several years ago (Accelerate BC) and the program needs another infusion soon to keep these matches going.

Dr. Michael Gallagher, President and CEO of Westport Innovations Inc., talked about the vision of Westport to promote natural gas as an alternative fuel to oil.  Westport is one of BC’s poster companies for global success in terms of rate of growth and potential in the clean-tech landscape.  Michael emphasized three themes — the importance of commercialization of  research results, the challenges that face companies as they grow such as intellectual property issues and finding skilled employees,  and the importance of partnerships with other businesses (like Terasen (natural gas) and Cummins (engines).

The last panelist was Jayson Myers, President and CEO of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.  Jayson talked about the importance of the commercialization process — how do we generate something of economic value?  He talked about new solutions, new products, re-engineering existing businesses and differentiating our various products and services.   He also called for leadership from both business and government to tackle these challenges.

So now a plug for Chapter Three:  Positioning for Prosperity:  Commercial and Industrial Opportunities for a New BC Economy. Tuesday October 20 7:30am-12:15pm.  That is one busy week in Vancouver — Outlook 2020, the Gaining Ground conference, and various other activities!

Categories
Business Education Pacific Coast Collaboration Policy Shaping Collaborations

MQ Summary of BCBC Summit: Part 2

It’s all about people — how we educate them, value them and motivate them to learn, re-tool and learn again.  The second session at the Chapter Two Summit was entitled:  In Training for Prosperity:  Education and the Real Value of BC’s Human Capital. Tamara Vrooman, President and CEO of Vancity Credit Union was a superb moderator — smoothly linking the presentations and asking questions that drew out the essence of the issues and a focus on what can be done.  The panelists were Clyde Hertzman, Director of the Human Early Learning Program at UBC,  Judith Sayers, Strategic Advisor for the Hupacasath First Nation and Anibal Valente, Vice-President, PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc.

Clyde gave us a passionate and fluent summary of ‘15 by 15‘ — a comprehensive policy framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC.  15 by 15 refers to the BC government Strategic Plan commitment to lowering the provincial rate of early vulnerability to 15% by 2015.  Clyde presented six recommendations from his report (http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Hertzman.pdf) but perhaps most useful was when Jock Finlayson asked from the floor — what are the top 3 to-do’s to get results in improving our early childhood education and development — which is an important investment to help us tackle the demographic challenges that Baxter talked about in terms of a skilled workforce.

1.  Support the government’s plan to institute full-day kindergarten as part of the strategy to provide “seamless transition for families as the parental leave period ends in order to make quality services for children age 19 month to kindergarten affordable and available…”

2.  Expand maternity and parental leave — we need to “support parents to synchronize caring and earning” —  we need a good balance of time and resources for in-family care and resources for strengthening the community service component.

3.  Keep following the development trajectory — make sure we monitor regularly so developmental challenges are caught early when they can be corrected relatively easily.

Next, Judith clearly outlined the challenges facing First Nations people and encouraged the business community to look to First Nations as an incredible pool of talent and human capital at a time when we see the general population aging and retiring.

Dan Perrin’s paper on First Nations and Economic Prosperity in the Coming Decade (http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Perrin.pdf) contains two important messages:

1.  Aboriginal education achievement has to be a high priority in terms of maintaining some of our gains from the last few years and ramping up to achieve more gains, more quickly.

2.  Economic Success for First Nations “…has highlighted the importance of improved governance, self-determination and leadership for the economic and social development of Aboriginal communities.”  Information/assistance needs to get into the hands of First Nations as they get into business — various institutions and programs can help.

I have always imagined a wonderful scenario where the grade 9 aboriginal boy is bored silly by school, wants to quit and needs to have a sense of finding his way in the world.  Miraculously we have developed a program that will allow him to leave “traditional” schooling and move into the workplace where he learns on the job, is motivated by seeing what he can produce and at the end of the day gets credit for this work/learning in a diploma form and becomes a hugely productive and happy member of our workforce.  There has got to be a way to do this.  We are losing too much human capital because our system isn’t flexible enough to allow different kinds of learning.

And finally, Anibal from PCL outlined some of the programs that PCL has in place to respond to work force and skills training.  For example, this company has been proactive by creating the “PCL College of Construction”.  They have field personnel advisors who promote construction careers in high schools.  And they have made good use of the Provincial Nominee Program which assisted in bringing 86 skilled worked from other countries into our  BC workforce.

When asked about what the Business Council way forward might be, there was the following advice:

1.  Don’t wait for government or the competition to do it for you!

2.  Develop a Strategic Human Capital Plan — that coordinates levels of government and industry and educational institutions.

3.  Think about human development across the life course — from our first learnings as baby to our life long learning through to our senior years.

Whew — this post is too long.  Will make the one on Innovation shorter!

Categories
Policy Shaping Collaborations Post Secondary Education Sauder Business School

MQ Notes from BC Business Council Summit: Part 1

What will BC’s next economy look like? Chapter Two of the BC Business Council’s Outlook 2020 series is entitled: Foundations for the Future:  Innovation, Human Capital and BC’s Next Economy. Yesterday morning we were in the Pan Pacific “Crystal” Ballroom (you know the one with all the ceiling of solid little hanging crystal pendants — talk about a design problem — how to design a space for several hundreds of people that has good ventilation, views and a sense of place and energy about it — but that is another topic).

The “we” in this case is notable — need to look into the average age of participants but it seemed older than it should be for the topic of the future economy.  Maybe we need to have a Summit where we each invite a 20-something or a 30-something.

Anyway David Baxter — our favourite demographer — led off the morning.  In nutshell — baby boomers are entering their senior years and the pine beetle eating habits have changed the structure of our economy.  How are we going to pay our bills given our top-heavy age profile?  Interestingly enough while women still outlive men, that is gradually changing and eventually we’ll be housing more elderly couples.

A moment of levity came with a slide of a young boy holding a knife in an electric socket — this was in response to the question of “why” women live longer than men.  Baxter called it the “goofball” gene.

So how will we pay our bills?  Migration, work longer, work smarter and increase our productivity, increase employment in general and enlarge the availability of work.

Comes down to an import-export dilemma — we export fuel, natural gas, forest products, mineral products and services internationally.  All good.  But we import more than we export now — partly because we don’t grow our own food (also requires a longer discussion — not sure I buy all David’s arguments about why local food won’t work as part of the equation) so we need to import food products and of course manufactured goods are a large % of what we import.  As Baxter writes:  “…what we do, primarily, is to import manufactured products that we pay for by exporting natural resources (raw and processed).”

Interesting about our trading partners — US is number 1 ( 52% of our exports),  Japan number 2 (15%) — and South Korea (6%) (not China) is number 3.  So we need to pay attention to that.

All-in-all a good set-up for the panel on human capital and on innovation.  Blogs Part 2 and 3 coming up.

You can find David Baxter’s full report at: http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Baxter.pdf

What I was left wondering is where does the new, green economy fit into this demographic/economic picture?  In the next little while we’ll be talking a lot about the green economy — the Province and the City are both setting out green economy agendas.  The Gaining Ground conference (www.gaininggroundsummit.com) has the green economy as an important theme.  If we think about it in import and export terms — what will the clean tech sector, for example, contribute?  And what policies need to be in place for this sector to flourish?

Categories
Sauder Business School Sustainability

Sustainability Innovators — a new set of business competencies?

In my quest to learn as much as possible about the business school culture I have added the Harvard Business Review to my regular reading list.  I already tweeted that the September 09 issue is about Sustainability/Innovation and how green will save us.  There are four centre pieces under this umbrella — “Why Sustainability is Now the Key Driver of Innovation”, “Six Sources of Limitless Energy”, “Using Gifts and Trees to Make Recyclers of Indian Consumers” and “Creating Value in an Economic Crisis” (Bill Clinton) but the key one for me is the innovation piece.

It is authored by Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R. Rangaswami (1 academic and 2 business people) and their key message is that sustainability will yield “both top-line and bottom-line returns” for business.  The context is that often when companies have waved the sustainability flag in the past, it has been under the corporate social responsibility umbrella.  The discussion around board room tables often focused on the expectations that sustainability would adversely affect their bottom line, certainly deliver no financial benefits and perhaps even make them less competitive.But now the evidence is building that companies who embrace organizational and technological innovation that move them to be players in the zero-carbon economy and leaders in conservation, will be at the head of the pack as the economy cycles back.  The authors cite 5 stages that companies go through as they explore ways to make their companies sustainability flagships:

  1. Viewing compliance as an opportunity;
  2. Making value chain sustainable;
  3. Designing sustainable products and services;
  4. Developing new business models; and,
  5. Creating next-practice platforms.

What is really interesting to me is the competencies that they cite as being necessary in companies that are going to be successful in moving through these stages.  These are clues as to how the business curriculum needs to adjust — competencies in carbon management and life-cycle assessment, ability to re-design systems to use less energy and water, capacity to understand what consumers want and to be creative in finding ways to meet the demands and the knowledge of how renewable and nonrenewable resources affect business ecosystems and industries.

So — if these people have it right — the drive for sustainability has the potential to motivate companies to be big innovators and to make the triple bottom line work — positive movement in the environmental, social and economic columns of the spreadsheet.

And — it also means that business schools have a responsibility to integrate new competencies or at least refine competencies to ensure their graduates have the skills to be sustainability innovators.  And the learning models to support building those competencies.

Categories
Green/Sustainable Cities

Batteries — owning or renting?

So — I am not ready yet to outline my blog approach — maybe there shouldn’t be one.

In the meantime, I am loving the fact that I get emails from Economist.com with the latest in a variety of topics including technology, green, business education and so on.  It is hard not to love their writing skill.  This one caught my eye:

The electrification of motoring:  The electric-fuel-trade acid test (Sept 3.09).

So I read on to find them talking about one of my favourite terms — invented at the Harvard Business School in 1995 by two researchers — the term is: disruptive technology — an innovation that fulfills the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the original technology.  They use the example of how charge-coupled devices or CCDs were the technical “disruption” needed to change us from careful photographers with only 24 or 36 shots in a roll  of film to free-wheeling snappers taking 1000+ pictures on a holiday (a weekend holiday) — and then sending them to all our friends.

The Economist writer used this story as a preamble/warning to the car companies that they had better be on the alert as disruptive technologies in batteries have been building over the past little while.

To quote:  “Bold claims are being made.  Carlos Ghosen, who leads the Renault-Nissan alliance, thinks 10% of new cars both in 2020 will be pure-battery vehicles…If that trend continues, liquid fuels might become as obsolete as photographic film.”

So if CCDs were the trigger for digital cameras, then the equivalent for electric cars is the lithium-ion battery or Li-ion.

The story goes on in quite a bit of detail —  rippling through options such as specialized city cars (accept minimal range), adding a gas-driven generator known as a “range extender” or do the all-battery thing but introduce battery-exchange stations.

This last idea has a proponent in a California firm called Better Place — they are looking to retro-fit current gas stations and turn them into car-charging and battery-swapping stations.

An interesting point from a consumer perspective is that “separating ownership of the battery from ownership of the car changes the economics of electric vehicles.  If you rent the battery rather than buying it, that becomes a running cost (like petrol) and the sticker price of the car drops accordingly.  This may not matter to the sophisticated economist, who would amortise the battery cost over the life of the vehicle.  Many people, though, are swayed by the number they write on the cheque that they give to the dealer.”

The article goes on to extend these ideas — giving me hope that when I am too aged to ride my Vespa, there will be a well-designed, electric car available — at least for rent!

Categories
Green/Sustainable Cities

Resilient Cities — conference coming up!

Labour Day.  Seems like the right day to start work again on MQblog.  Armed with advice from Kirk LaPointe (my mentor on twitter, blog etc.) am going to try to link all these different media.  And I need to apply discipline to be a regular blogger.  Am thinking about a series of themes that will suit my new job with some new approaches.  But that is for the next blog.

Right now I want to promote the Gaining Ground conference in Vancouver Oct 20-22 — the Topic is Resilient Cities: Urban Strategies for Transition Times.

As Deputy I supported several Gaining Ground (GG) conferences in Victoria and recently I attended a Gaining Ground Calgary called Energy and the Future of Calgary.  They are really great conferences — I like them because they are hybrids — a great mix of professionals, academics, business people, community folks — all with different points of view.

You can check out the conference web site at:   www.gaininggroundsummit.com which will give you additional current information including the registration link.

I heard Sarah Severn (one of the speakers) in Calgary — she is the Director of Horizons at Nike — their Corporate Social Responsibility Program.  Worth coming to GG just to hear her and find out what businesses south of the border are up to.

Want to keep this one short because am going to try to link the media now.  Fingers crossed.

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