The Logic, a new subscription journalism outlet dedicated to Canadian innovation and tech policy, had a couple of great stories about a month ago that are worth highlighting simply to remember the general poverty of the standard U-15/Universities Canada line about higher education and economic growth.  (The articles are behind a paywall, so you’re going to have to trust me on what they say).

The first article had a worrying headline, “Ottawa has a plan to build 10 tech companies in 10 years”, which conjured up some nightmare images of Navdeep Bains not just picking specific technologies but specific companies on which to sprinkle magic pixie dust.  But read past the headline, and it quickly became clear that the story was about a report done for ISED, which attempted to answer the question “what can the Government of Canada do to encourage young tech start-ups to scale to the point where they become genuinely world-class $1 billion companies” mainly through a set of intelligently-designed key informant interviews.

(How do I know they were intelligently designed?  Because in a second article, The Logic actually posted the full document on its website, which for me was worth the entire year’s subscription price in one shot.  Seriously, if this topic is of interest to you, I really recommend a subscription).

Why do large domestic tech companies matter?  Well, I am a little bit more classically liberal – economically speaking – than most so I’m not 100% sold on the domestic angle (Singapore, for instance, seems to do pretty well without domestic champions). Still, having more big companies serving global markets in your local economy has loads of benefits, mainly in terms of employment, growth, and skills.  As far as growth is concerned, big companies are far better than little ones (there are potentially competition implications for very large companies, but if they are mostly exporting it’s less of an issue).

So, guess what was not even vaguely considered as a factor in the creation of big companies?  Yep, you guessed it: university research.

Part of that, I suspect, is the nature of the tech economy.  Consumer-facing tech companies are often magpies, putting together bits of knowledge and technology from lots of different places.  Shopify, for instance, is a big (for us) Canadian tech company, but as far as I know it does not rely on any Canadian university-made patents.  I kind of doubt there’s a whole lot of indirect IP from basic research there either – tech companies live on their own workers’ energy and creativity.  It’s a little bit different in some other fields – bio-medicine is more likely to be working off university IP (formal or from basic research), but on the whole university research isn’t a catalyst.

In fact, according to this report for the ISED, tech companies don’t even really have any complaints about the stream of tech talent.  To the extent they need extra talent, they don’t need a lot of extra fresh grads; what they need is very specialized knowledge tempered with years of expertise, which they think is more likely to be addressed through immigration than through education.  In this, I suspect businesses are a lot smarter than the governments who want to speak in their name: so-called “skills shortages” are usually shortages of seasoned workers, not the number of workers tout court, and hence can’t sensibly be dealt just by cranking up enrolment in certain programs.

So, what are the scaling challenges tech companies have that do relate to post-secondary? Here’s the key quote:

“More assets than STEM skills are required for productivity growth.  Additional skills such as business and management such as customer-facing skills (i.e. skills and marketing); higher order cognitive skills such as creative problem solving and critical thinking…there is a mismatch between what companies need and what local labour markets can offer.  In particular, Canada is lacking a supply of business management or customer-facing talent, such as sales and marketing.”  

(I would never of course be so gauche as to say “I told you so”, but <cough> May 18, 2016 and June 12, 2017 <cough>.)

The point here is simple: if Canadian universities want to contribute to economic growth, they need to start actually paying attention to how their curriculum and pedagogy is improving skills.  That’s the play.  Not research.  We’ve gone as far as we can go down that road for the time being.  The game is now teaching, learning and outcomes.  I know, it’s difficult, not least because its tough to focus on curriculum when some faculties punted the entire notion of curriculum in favour of a smorgasbord credit approach 50 years ago.  But guess what?  That’s the stuff that actually matters.

For the second time in a couple of months, the lights are flashing red for the whole Spending-Billion-on-University-Research-is-the-Sole-Path-To-Economic-Growth shtick that the U-15 and Universities Canada have been pushing for the path two decades.  First the Nicholson Report, now this.  Universities need to wise up to this, fast.