Technology

information & communication technology

Spreading like Fire

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Steven Garrity of SilverOrange has been featured as volunteer of the week on the Spread Firefox site. The site (built on the Drupal CMS) is dedicated to supporting the Firefox user and developer communities, and Steven has been instrumental in the design of the beautiful Firefox artwork. Here is a local (PEI) designer working on an international project, giving much of his own time and supported by his company. The work that SilverOrange does exemplifies the new economy and shows how Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurs can be active participants from out here on the edge, because it’s a World of Ends.

Innovation and Idea Protectionism

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Albert Ip talks about the reality of developing new products, and then dealing with lawyers and patent issues.

In these days of patent lock-up, it is NOT about publishing the achievement and improvement. My patent lawyer told me the other day, it is about limiting other people’s use of your idea. Hence this concept of patent portfolio and mutual licensing. He advised me to break my invention into several patents in order to start building a patent portfolio. When there is a way of doing thing which is lock up in other’s patent (by the way, I discover the method myself independently – but it does not matter, somebody has the exclusive right just before you), one can use one’s patent portfolio to negotiate for some mutual licensing. This makes sense, a lot of $en$e – but only to the lawyers! I ended up protecting my IP using "trade secret". BTW, if you ask nicely, I may tell you my trade secret after a drink.

Albert’s experience shows why the open source movement and intiatives like Creative Commons are essential for innovation and for our continuing economic growth. Innovation is NOT about limiting other people’s use of your idea. Our civilisation and technology is where it is today because scientists and others freely shared their findings in order to grow their disciplines. Albert is keeping his secrets, but on his terms. We should do like CC says – skip the intermediaries [lawyers].

Innovation Articles – Summary

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The LearnNB community has been provided with a number of PDF articles on innovation – mostly Canadian perspectives. These are in preparation for the quarterly meeting this Wednesday, September 22nd. The documents have been hidden away (password-protected) in the collaborative work space for LearnNB (I can set up an account if you want one). I have also posted the names of the articles on the public LearnNB blog. A quick search today has shown that most of these documents are freely available, and I’ve done a quick synthesis of a few.

What follows are some short summaries of the documents that caught my attention.

A series of three articles from Research Money by Alan Cornford, (significant subscription fee required) provide some interesting observations on innovation. Cornford states that increasing R&D spending will not increase innovation capacity, as only 3% of of public R&D spending results in measurable innovation; the only way to measure innovation is through the outputs – or local wealth generation; and there is plenty of VC money available, but not enough finance-worthy ventures. The key to driving innovation is having the right people. He also shows that private sector investment has 15 times the return on investment as that of the public sector. His main recommendation is not to weaken public R&D spending, but to strengthen it through private partnerships, especially with small and medium sized enterprises. Cornford is also in favour of enhanced R&D tax credits and the channelling of government investment into "community innovation idea outreach" to communties and SME’s
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Where local SME (small and medium enterprise) R&D receptor capacity is limited (as in most of Canada), the universities, polytechnics
and colleges can conduct applied R&D for local SME industry and therefore benefit from these increased R&D investments, while community SME innovative capacity grows.

Cornford also produced a report for ACOA in 2002, entitled – Innovation and Commercialization in Atlantic Canada , which I have not read yet.

A different perspective is presented by Douglas Barber, who in 2003 surveyed the 120 most innovative companies in Canada, (those who spent more than 3% on R&D) and determined that the main issues around innovation were inadequate tax

incentives, lack of qualified workers, uncoordinated government support and regulation concerning R&D. These companies included Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, BCE

Emergis Inc., Corel Corporation, GlaxoSmithKline Inc., Pratt & Whitney Canada Corp., and Sierra Wireless, Inc.. This paper focuses primarily on large companies, not SME’s.

Denzil Doyle in a 2004 report for ITAC (PDF) examined the selling of Canadian high-tech companies and purchases by foreign investors. This again focuses on larger companies, not the smaller companies that are predominant in Atlantic Canada. Doyle concludes that:

This paper has been written on the assumption that Canadian policy makers want to position Canada as a global player in the worldwide high-tech industry. In order to achieve

that goal it will not only have to create a favourable environment for foreign-owned branch plants but it will have to grow several world class companies with the majority of

corporate decision-making carried out in Canada. Examples of such companies are Nortel Networks, Cognos, ATI Technologies, OpenText, McDonald Detweiller Associates, and

Research In Motion.



While Canadians can be proud of their R&D skills and achievements in nearly every field of technology, more attention should be paid to ways and means of commercializing

more of the resultant technology in Canada. This will require the development of a financing industry that is capable of launching companies properly and of taking financial

control of them when the original investors decide to exit their investments.

Other documents available from the government of Canada, include: Knowledge Matters: Skills & Learning for Canadians

This document addresss, at a very high policy level, how the government can foster learning for in public education, build the workforce, and attract more immigrants.

The series of government documents on innovation are good for those planning initiatives that they wish to align with government policy – good until the next election.

A shorter paper, by Peter Josty on technology commercialisation focuses on Alberta’s situation, and provides some case-specific information, as well as a short SWOT analysis. This is a quicker read than some of the others, with a Western perspective.

I’m sure that you’re seeing some common themes (tax credits), and there are more documents that I haven’t read yet. I hope that this quick summary provides a bit of an overview for my colleagues who will be at the meeting in Fredericton this week. See you there.

Innovative Entrepreneurs

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Dave Pollard has written a concise article on how to stimulate and measure Canadian innovation. He trashes the methods used by the federal government and the BC science council to measure and promote innovation. I agree with his verdict – they’re lame.

And if you want to stimulate innovation, invest in the people that live and die by innovation — entrepreneurs. Their profits stay in the community, get reinvested, and create jobs. By all means subsidize those entrepreneurs to do their research at Canadian universities — you better believe that research will be focused on commercial opportunity.

To continue the thread started by the Atlantic open source gatherings this Summer, as well as the blogger meeting in Moncton this week, the common threads of interest appear to be:

  1. open source models for software, innovation and learning
  2. new business models, including natural enterprises
  3. networking and learning in the digital commons (blogs, YASNS, wikis, etc)
  4. economic development at a grassroots level in Atlantic Canada

I’m sure that many of the small, outwardly focused, technologically savvy companies in the region would not been impressed by measurements like "percent of population completing university", as a means to determine innovation. There are many successful entrepreneurs here who have skipped university in order to really innovate.

At the blogger dinner in Moncton there were at least three new business initiatives that we discussed and these will be followed-up. Not bad for seven folks in the space of a couple of hours. This was more successful in fostering innovation that most sponsored conferences on innovation. So let’s keep the conversation going, especially in the blogosphere, and let’s have a mass innovation meet next month. With 20 to 30 entrepreneurial individuals networking over pizza & beer (or your choice of brain food) I’m certain that we can start an Atlantic movement to help each other, and kick butt internationally.

All of the ingredients are here – smart people, nimble companies, a sense of community, existing relationships, and a hunger for something better. There are still a number of us who have to get to know each other a bit better, so I hope to see many of you in Sackville at the end of next month.

Please post your comments as well as your preferred dates.

 

Blogs or LMS?

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Jeremy Hiebert makes an interesting comparison between blogs and LMS in higher education:

But then I really cringed when I hit the conluding sentence: "A blogging tool would be a valuable addition, therefore, to any LMS." No, no, no, no, NO.



In spirit, blogs are the opposite of a Learning Management System like WebCT. If you lock personal publishing away inside an LMS, it’s the equivalent of yet another crappy discussion board in a course. Blogs work because people are engaged in their own interests and can find their network from the entire world. An LMS constrains the topic, assignments and partipants, closing off any potential for authentic outside interaction and personal engagement.

Could not have said it better myself – it’s about learner control.

 

Drupal Review

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Cameron Bales and I just wrote a review of the Drupal content management system for Rick Bruner’s Business Blog Consulting site. I’m sure that we may have missed a few things, so please post any additions or other comments about Drupal. This will enable interested parties to make informed technology decisions without the marketing hype that you would get from proprietary software. We may be open source evangelists, but we won’t hide any weaknesses because we know that the community will help to solve any problems. The more I use Drupal, the more I feel that it is an excellent CMS to manage a website and multiple blogs. I also know that it can do a lot more.

Update: Boris Mann adds more details and perspective to our review.
and … there are further comments on the Drupal site; so read them all to get a complete perspective.

One final reason to use Drupal – because Doc Searls does!

Enterprise Strength Drupal

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I’m working on an evaluation of the Drupal CMS (content management system) for Rick Bruner, with the able assistance of Cameron Bales and Christopher MacKay (they know a lot more than I do about Drupal). One of the questions that Rick asks is whether the CMS is appropriate for corporate blogging. I think that this post by start-up Bryght.com tells it all:

Our business is going to be mass-hosting of Drupal sites. This means three separate channels: mass deployment (large organizations/companies/ISPs that want to run/deploy 100s of sites), resellers (developers, designers, and consultants that want to offer sites to end user clients but don’t want the hassle/administration of installation and maintenance), and end users.

This makes me feel more secure in the long term stability of Drupal as my CMS. Via Mark Oehlert.

Synergy

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I am interested in the intersection of learning, work and technology. Why? One reason is that I firmly believe that a multi-disciplinary approach can solve more complex problems. I try to stay current in matters of learning theories, instructional design, collaborative work, business models, economics, etc. Here is another reason, by Peter Smith of California State University, in an article entitled – Of Icebergs, Ships, and Arrogant Captains, published by Educause Review:

Synergy, a biological term, is defined as “the action of two or more substances, organs, or organisms, to achieve an effect of which each is individually incapable”  By itself, technology cannot save us. Considered in a vacuum, new learning models for organizations and individuals might not dramatically improve the impact of higher education. But if we understand and anticipate the synergy of the social, technological, economic, and political forces at work around us, employing them together, we will be able to achieve what cannot be done by employing any of these forces alone.