Quotes

I don't think Canadians have given themselves permission to innovate the way Americans do. The very traits that we hold dear - our politeness, our collaborative tendencies, our unwillingness to let people fail badly - are all things that inhibit innovation. It's not that Canadians can't do it. It's just that we may be less likely to do it than some other cultures.

Productivity is not a boring subject. It's the key to our economic prosperity. And we're failing miserably at it - it's tragic. For years now I'd been giving these speeches about productivity, and afterwards people would come up and say, 'Great, now you've scared us to death. But what can we do about it?' And I didn't have a response. So I started to dig into it and what I discovered is that there is an easy answer, and it's innovation.

Organizational behavior theorists believe that increasingly, no matter what your job is, you are going to be taxed with complex problems. So, if we're not actually training people to absorb and process information in a way to meet that challenge, then we are creating a whole group of people who are in another class. Not just socio-economically, but mentally too.

[on the meaning of 'innovation'] The best definition I've seen is: an old idea meets a new idea and the outcome changes behavior.

[on education today and the notion of innovation] When you think about it, everybody's system was designed for the industrial age and it's still really geared around these outcomes, whether it's standardized testing or core subjects. We've ignored the fact that textbooks aren't scarce anymore, information isn't scarce anymore. There's no reason why the teacher has to have all the answers and give them to the kids. The challenge is how do we create people who know how to think.