We hear the word “innovation” regularly in discussions about the role of universities, and in particular in Canada where there is said to be an “innovation gap” in the economy. Building on a previous piece, in this blog post I raise the rivalry between Edison and Tesla, since those two figures are oft-cited in the discussion of how scientific advances happen and how they’re turned into commercial success. What is the key to “discovery”, and how can we best facilitate it? Can we move beyond these categories (invention, innovation) and find a more helpful way of thinking about how knowledge becomes “economised” in this way (turned into marketable objects)?
Category / Research
Speculative Diction: Contemplation of Innovation [October 31 2011]
This post takes a look at the report produced by a government panel led by Tom Jenkins, placing the report in the context of decades of Canadian government policy and critiques about “lack of innovation” and the low level of research done by Canadian industry.
Speculative Diction: More than a storm in a teacup – the debate on academic blogging
This was a follow-up post that I wrote (published on October 21, 2011) after a briefer article of mine on academic blogging was published in University Affairs. I wanted to get into some more of the reasons why blogging is still considered a lesser form of communication, and therefore isn’t something that usually contributes to building an academic career.
Bibliography: Discourse Analysis, CDA, and Pragmatics
I created this bibliography for personal reference, and thought I’d share it here as well:
Speculative Diction: Technology & Research, Part 1 & 2 [October, 2010]
The first of these two posts is about Delicious (which at the time was called del.icio.us), a social bookmarking tool that I used to use but which I’ve now replaced with Diigo. I switched sites when the original version was sold off and it was unclear if or when the site would be usable again.
The second post is about using Twitter as a research tool, which at the time I incorporated with del.icio.us but which I now use with Diigo, and Chrome instead of Firefox.
Whiteboard Workout 