The U of T’s University College renovation by Kohn Shnier Architects and ERA Architects.Handout
Neil Seeman is an author, Internet entrepreneur and researcher. He is the author of Accelerated Minds: Unlocking the Fascinating, Inspiring, and Often Destructive Impulses that Drive the Entrepreneurial Brain.
Academia is where hyper-specialists, or “moles,” tend to thrive. Moles are animals that burrow deep in one specific hole for most of their lives.
But universities have tended to ignore the opposite of moles: the “mutts,” animals of mixed background, who sniff around a wide swath of territory and accumulate working knowledge in many disparate fields. Mutts imagine the universe as vast and ever evolving, requiring a wide angle view rather than one-track expertise.
With respect to the mole/mutt dichotomy, industry has generally leapt ahead of academia. Today’s rising industrial stars have realized that moles need mutts. The requisite alignment is evident in technology; we see it currently in AI and biotechnology, and in a range of fast-growing sectors.
So what can be done to make Canadian higher-education institutions see the value of mutts?
We continue to face an acute talent shortage in the multidisciplinary industries where we have the highest demand for workers: information technology and health care. And it’s not just about coders and doctors; AI, for example, demands interdisciplinary talents, including linguistics, ethics, math and computer science.
Meanwhile, the Information and Communications Technology Council has forecast that, by 2025, Canada will need 129,000 skilled workers in digital health and biotechnology, with training in data analysis, biostatistics, machine learning and information visualization.
The Globe and Mail’s 2022 list of Canada’s fastest-growing companies suggests that company leaders whose firms rank highly are more multidisciplinary than mole-like in their careers.
The founder of top-ranked Orion Construction Ltd. of Langley, B.C., Joshua Gagliardi, studied economics at UBC prior to a career in construction.
The president of second-ranked Power Staffing Solutions, a staffing and recruiting agency for IT and health care, is Saye Sathiyakumar, who studied graphic communications management at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Rebecca Kacaba, chief executive officer and co-founder of third-ranked DealMaker, a tech platform enabling firms to raise capital, pursued a degree in psychology at Western, followed by law at the University of Windsor. She rose to partner at an international law firm before starting DealMaker.
This success of mutts in industry puts a harsh spotlight on how they are neglected in academia.
Some surging business sectors, such as the Canadian video game industry, prize multidisciplinary people variously skilled in visual aesthetics, fiction and programming.
But among the top 50 undergraduate game design programs ranked by The Princeton Review, just two are Canadian: the Vancouver Film School and LaSalle College Vancouver. Many of the U.S. programs on the top-50 international list are now housed at that country’s top research universities, such as MIT and NYU, offering interdisciplinary scholarship and entrepreneurship training.
For innovation to blossom, we need to cultivate what some observers such as Marion Thain of King’s College London have called “radical interdisciplinarity” to redress the large societal post-pandemic problems we face, from social inequities to distressed health care to urban blight.
So let’s change the incentives. Imagine if interdisciplinarity were rewarded economically in the workplace. Publishing patents and academic papers that bridge disciplines could be a new path to the tenure track, more so than the number of scholarly papers in high-impact journals. CEOs of tech firms could award bonuses for new product launches that draw on inspiration from non-technical fields.
We can learn from Oxford University’s program in philosophy, politics and economics. Employers across the world readily recruit from the PPE program since its graduates are “Renaissance scholars,” an old term for mutts. And the PPE degree remains today among the most sought after by Oxford students, with a more competitive admissions rate than computer science or medicine.
Mutts are everywhere among us. But the biggest impediment to their ascendance in Canada’s work force is that moles, on the whole, don’t understand them.
My colleague, Diane Finegood, a specialist in systems thinking at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, explains that mutts can be perplexing to moles. Moles see the future as linear. Mutts see the future as an Einstein shape, aperiodic, containing infinite possibility.
Linear or aperiodic, for Canadian innovation to flourish, moles need to work together with mutts.
TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index was higher in late-morning trading, helped by strength in energy stocks, while U.S. stock markets also moved up.
The S&P/TSX composite index was up 34.91 points at 23,736.98.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 178.05 points at 41,800.13. The S&P 500 index was up 28.38 points at 5,661.47, while the Nasdaq composite was up 133.17 points at 17,725.30.
The Canadian dollar traded for 73.56 cents US compared with 73.57 cents US on Monday.
The November crude oil contract was up 68 cents at US$69.70 per barrel and the October natural gas contract was up three cents at US$2.40 per mmBTU.
The December gold contract was down US$7.80 at US$2,601.10 an ounce and the December copper contract was up a penny at US$4.28 a pound.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
OTTAWA – Canada’s inflation rate fell to two per cent last month, finally hitting the Bank of Canada’s target after a tumultuous battle with skyrocketing price growth.
The annual inflation rate fell from 2.5 per cent in July to reach the lowest level since February 2021.
Statistics Canada’s consumer price index report on Tuesday attributed the slowdown in part to lower gasoline prices.
Clothing and footwear prices also decreased on a month-over-month basis, marking the first decline in the month of August since 1971 as retailers offered larger discounts to entice shoppers amid slowing demand.
The Bank of Canada’s preferred core measures of inflation, which strip out volatility in prices, also edged down in August.
The marked slowdown in price growth last month was steeper than the 2.1 per cent annual increase forecasters were expecting ahead of Tuesday’s release and will likely spark speculation of a larger interest rate cut next month from the Bank of Canada.
“Inflation remains unthreatening and the Bank of Canada should now focus on trying to stimulate the economy and halting the upward climb in the unemployment rate,” wrote CIBC senior economist Andrew Grantham.
Benjamin Reitzes, managing director of Canadian rates and macro strategist at BMO, said Tuesday’s figures “tilt the scales” slightly in favour of more aggressive cuts, though he noted the Bank of Canada will have one more inflation reading before its October rate announcement.
“If we get another big downside surprise, calls for a 50 basis-point cut will only grow louder,” wrote Reitzes in a client note.
The central bank began rapidly hiking interest rates in March 2022 in response to runaway inflation, which peaked at a whopping 8.1 per cent that summer.
The central bank increased its key lending rate to five per cent and held it at that level until June 2024, when it delivered its first rate cut in four years.
A combination of recovered global supply chains and high interest rates have helped cool price growth in Canada and around the world.
Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem recently signalled that the central bank is ready to increase the size of its interest rate cuts, if inflation or the economy slow by more than expected.
Its key lending rate currently stands at 4.25 per cent.
CIBC is forecasting the central bank will cut its key rate by two percentage points between now and the middle of next year.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is also expected on Wednesday to deliver its first interest rate cut in four years.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick‘s finance minister says the province recorded a surplus of $500.8 million for the fiscal year that ended in March.
Ernie Steeves says the amount — more than 10 times higher than the province’s original $40.3-million budget projection for the 2023-24 fiscal year — was largely the result of a strong economy and population growth.
The report of a big surplus comes as the province prepares for an election campaign, which will officially start on Thursday and end with a vote on Oct. 21.
Steeves says growth of the surplus was fed by revenue from the Harmonized Sales Tax and federal money, especially for health-care funding.
Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs has promised to reduce the HST by two percentage points to 13 per cent if the party is elected to govern next month.
Meanwhile, the province’s net debt, according to the audited consolidated financial statements, has dropped from $12.3 billion in 2022-23 to $11.8 billion in the most recent fiscal year.
Liberal critic René Legacy says having a stronger balance sheet does not eliminate issues in health care, housing and education.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
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