I want to return to France to give back my experience, skills, and technical knowledge to the country of my heritage. France’s industrial economy is in the doldrums, but new policies are stimulating innovation, the key to economic growth and productivity, and technology industry leaders in France with strong technology industry backgrounds are looking to contribute to this new economy in France. I want to join them and give back.
In less than 24 hours since our campaign launch, we are nearing 10% of our goal
I am a native-born Californian with French family heritage and a French wife. We are both French citizens preparing to return to France. My university background is in the Humanities and Social Sciences, with a year of graduate study at Oxford University, researching in the Bodleian Library. When I returned to northern California, I eventually landed an entry-level job at Intel Corporation, which proved to be the crucible for my entire career. I eventually rose to be a senior executive in international business development with Intel. I have continued in international business for all of my career, working for a number of tech startups and venture capital investment firms over the years. I have led two tech industry consortia to develop global industry standards. I have been the director of a tech entrepreneurial incubator in Silicon Valley for the government of New Zealand and collaborated on mentoring promising entrepreneurs in locations here and around the world. I was an Adjunct Professor of Management at the University of British Columbia for four years.
I want to return to France to give back my experience, skills, and technical knowledge to the country of my heritage. France’s industrial economy is in the doldrums, but new policies are stimulating innovation, the key to economic growth and productivity, and technology industry leaders in France with strong technology industry backgrounds are looking to contribute to this new economy in France. I want to join them and give back.
I am now semi-retired, but very eager to return permanently to France to donate my technology industry experience and knowledge to assist French entrepreneurs to transform France into an innovation-based economy.
FundRazr Campaign Story:
We are David Mayes and Isabelle Roux-Mayes, a married couple, who are also French citizens. I am also a native Californian who has spent my career working for a number of Silicon Valley companies and investment firms, beginning with Intel Corporation. I am now semi-retired, but very eager to return permanently to France to donate my technology industry experience and knowledge to assist French entrepreneurs to transform France into an innovation-based economy. I am focusing specifically on building working relationships with three major new initiatives that could benefit from my background and achievements: The Camp in Aix-en-Provence, launched last year, Startup Garage, Paris, and 1kubator in Bourdeaux.
I am more than happy to share my achievements and references to validate my credentials and verify my ability to make a serious contribution. You can start here with my LinkedIn profile and references David Mayes on LinkedIn. You may also contact me here or on FundRazr where we can discuss my crowdfunding project.
How business schools are adapting to the changing world of work
Creativity, adaptability are now cornerstones of business education
Brandie Weikle · CBC News ·
Students chat in a hallway at Western University’s Ivey Business School in London, Ont. Business schools say they’ve adapted
their programming to fit a changing work world that prizes creative, agile workers who can adapt to rapid change. (Ivey Business School)
Forget about accounting class and marketing 101.
Canadian business school leaders say soft skills such as creativity and agility are now cornerstones of business education, as universities and colleges adapt to a world where many of the jobs graduates will hold don’t even exist today.
They say there’s still a role for those business basics, but they’re no longer enough to satisfy workplaces that prize employees who can adapt to swiftly changing industries, disruptive technology and the thorny issues facing humanity in the years to come.
“The goal of a university education is to teach people how to deal with uncertainty, how to be a critical thinker, how to be okay when things are changing,” said Darren Dahl, a senior associate dean at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in Vancouver.
“The notion of going to work for the big corporation, and the jobs that we traditionally do, are evolving and changing,” said Dahl. That’s put a lot of pressure on business schools to change what and how they teach, he said.
To keep on top of what employers are looking for, the staff at the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., recently completed 250 interviews with leaders in government, business and non-profits around the globe, said acting dean Mark Vandenbosch.
Mark Vandenbosch, acting dean of Ivey Business School, seen in this March 25, 2015, file photo, said today’s job market prizes soft skills. (Ivey Business School)
“Although people do need to have technical literacy that’s probably higher than before — the skills that are really demanded are the soft skills that will allow them to adapt,” said Vandenbosch.
‘Embracing creativity in a big way’
These include the ability to bring alternative viewpoints to a problem, he said, as well as things like creativity, grit, teamwork, communications effectiveness and decision-making skills.
At UBC, Dahl said the MBA program includes a required course in creativity. “That surprises some people,” he said. “Traditionally, you might think of a business school as beating out the creativity in students.”
The creativity class curriculum isn’t centered around business innovation, such as coming up with a new product. “It’s more base creativity,” he said.
Creativity is a muscle. How do we strengthen that muscle for you as a leader, whether you work in corporate or a non-profit or your own entrepreneurial venture?– Darren Dahl , associate dean, UBC’s Sauder School of Business
“Creativity is a muscle. If you stopped exercising it years ago — some people say you’re the most creative when you’re five or six years old and then it’s just downhill — how do we strengthen that muscle for you as a leader, whether you work in corporate or a non-profit or your own entrepreneurial venture?
“That’s a fundamental tool in the toolbox, and I think society has just woken up to that in the last five years,” said Dahl.
Joe Musicco, who teaches at Sheridan College’s Pilon School of Business in Toronto, said: “business is certainly embracing creativity in a big way.”
There are a number of factors contributing to the business world’s increasing interest in creativity, said Musicco.
“You could point to things like technology and AI [Artificial Intelligence]. You could point to things like the changing nature of work and being more of a thinker and a consultant, and expectations of people in general that [graduates] are going to be able to bring innovation and creative problem-solving skills to the table.”
Students have more diverse goals
What students want has changed, too.
“The younger generations today are very much interested in having an impact,” said Dahl.
“That could mean anything from having an impact by building their own business, to having a positive influence on society.”
In the past, most business school students would strive for the same jobs at large, branded international corporations, he said.
While some still do, others want to work for non-profits, and some want to be their own bosses, said Dahl.
Students are seen in class at Ivey Business School. (Ivey Business School)
Preparation for the entrepreneurial world
Dahl said there’s also been “a sea change in respect to the importance of entrepreneurial activity in the economy.”
To meet that need, course material is now taught differently, he said, moving away from “the classic lecturing on the stage” to methods that involve more action and applied learning.
Business school classes could be challenged to partner up with engineering students on a project, or to work with start-ups, for example.
At Ivey Business School, Vandenbosch said “a huge percentage of our graduates run their own businesses.”
The typical route they take, though, is to work for somebody else for a few years after graduation to get on-the-ground experience, then return to the school to take advantage of the entrepreneurial incubator it offers for alumni, he said.
“We provide a lot of support post graduation for those who want to come back at a later time to start a venture two, three or four years later.– Mark Vandenbosch, acting dean, Ivey Business School
“We provide a lot of support post-graduation for those who want to come back at a later time to start a venture two, three or four years later.”
One of the ways Ivey prepares graduates for a more entrepreneurial world is by throwing out the traditional undergraduate schedule where students make their own course selections then keep that schedule over a semester.
Instead, starting when they join Ivey in the third year, students show up at expected times each day, then programming is varied all year long, said Vandenbosch.
“Our focus is primarily on building experiences for students so they can build the capabilities to adapt to a future world, rather than, ‘Here is what you need to know about subject X.'”
SOMEONE FORGOT TO THINK OF THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Marc-David Seidel, UBC Apologist for the Amazon Deal Predicts Pie In the Sky Bye and Bye
Tech workers are already in short supply and Amazon’s increased presence likely to lure workers away from local technology-based startups
What upsets me most about this well-written article by Jenny Peng, is that she has exposed the fact that the enthusiasm for bringing Amazon to Vancouver appears to have caused long-term economic blindness in exchange for short-term political gain. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, BC Premier John Horgan, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, and the Vancouver Economic Commission’s acting CEO Brian Buggey, and Sean Elbe, head of VEC’s Technology Sector all need to address serious questions about the probable negative economic impacts of the Amazon deal, not to mention the disconnect with earlier official enthusiasm for Vancouver as an entrepreneurial hub. Which will it be, Amazon or high-tech startups?
Prior to the Amazon deal, the Trudeau government, BC and the Vancouver Economic Commission had been promoting the Global Talent Streamvisa initiative, which will indeed most likely benefit Amazon, but the situation for the Canadian government’s Startup Visa for immigrant entrepreneurial companies is far from favorable. So the Amazon deal seems to have sent another torpedo into the growth of the high-tech entrepreneurial economy in Vancouver.
Poignantly, one UBC Professor, Carson Woo, offers strong prima facie evidence from local companies of the probable damage, while another UBC Professor Marc-David Seidel acts as an apologist for Amazon, claiming that Amazon will create high-tech spinoffs sometime mañana. While Seidel may have a point, the reality is that such spinoff economic growth can literally take decades to develop, which offers weak justification for the Amazon decision. I offer the underwhelming examples of other such deals. Portland, Oregon is one such example. Intel and Nike remain the anchor employers of thousands of employees between them, and though there has been some spinoff growth over the years, it has been not much to write home about or to rival the economic importance of Intel and Nike. It is Seattle’s problem with Boeing. Vancouver has just done the identical thing.
VANCOUVER—Following Amazon’s announcement Monday that the company plans to add 3,000 jobs in Vancouver by 2022 with a new office, observers say this could increase the competition for highly skilled tech workers already in short supply.
The Seattle-based retail giant, which opened its first software development site in Vancouver in 2011 with over 1,000 employees, announced that the new jobs will be in e-commerce technology, cloud computing, and machine learning. Employees will be working in a tower the company plans to build on top of the old Canada Post office in downtown.
Carson Woo, associate professor of accounting and information systems at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, said hiring is “a zero-sum game” for tech companies.
He recalls sitting in on board meetings among high-level executives from some of the city’s top employers, who hoped Amazon doesn’t expand in Vancouver. Their reservation, Woo said, comes from the time and money they’ve invested in training these workers.
“Essentially, you’re taking people from other companies,” Woo said.
This is why Woo believes the Canadian government will eventually allow Amazon to hire from overseas like it did for Facebook and Microsoft in the past.
“Because otherwise, the local companies will really suffer,” he added.
Bill Klug, an instructor of cloud computing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, said small and medium-size companies will feel the pressure especially in what they pay their staff when competing with large multinational tech corporations.
In addition to demand outweighing the supply of tech workers, Amit Venugopal, managing director at Ecenta Canada Services, said Vancouver’s high costs of living has deterred workers he tried to recruit from the east coast who said the salaries offered don’t always match the cost of living.
“Vancouver has a very small native growth of technology workers and the cost of living is prohibiting people from other parts of Canada” moving to B.C., he said. In addition, workers aren’t always interested in being a programmer and opt for work in business or technology management that create a skills gap that employers need to fill.
Despite the growing competition for skilled tech workers, Marc-David Seidel, associate professor at Sauder, said his research in labour mobility indicates that these jobs will help Vancouver’s ecosystem to grow because as some employees will stay with Amazon long-term, others will create start-ups of their own, invest in other start-ups or work for other organizations, adding to the diversity of the workforce.
He highlighted Austin, Texas and Silicon Valley as examples of where the spin-offs helped grow the local tech economy.
“These types of announcements are more a sign that the ecosystem has been growing,” he said, “and that the culture that’s developing the ecosystem is being recognized by international players.”
Jenny Peng is a Vancouver-based reporter covering business. Follow her on Twitter: @JennyPengNow
The Vancouver technology industry may well be on the verge of an extraordinary period of growth. Global, national, and regional factors appear to be aligning in ways that could create an extraordinary economic opportunity for the Lower Mainland which could not have been anticipated. Vancouver has been an endless topic of discussion about its comparability (or not) to Silicon Valley, the historical Canadian investment conservatism, and the lack of other resources necessary to create the “secret sauce” that makes a region achieve critical mass. That may be changing if only the convergence of factors is grasped and exploited.
The Vancouver technology industry may well be on the verge of an extraordinary period of growth. Global, national, and regional factors appear to be aligning in ways that could create an extraordinary economic opportunity for the Lower Mainland which could not have been anticipated. Vancouver has been an endless topic of discussion about its comparability (or not) to Silicon Valley, the historical Canadian investment conservatism, and the lack of other resources necessary to create the “secret sauce” that makes a region achieve critical mass. That may be changing if only the convergence of factors is grasped and exploited.
In an expansion of regional cooperation, the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington today announced the establishment of the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative.
Universities establish joint centre to use data for social good in Cascadia region
Media Release | February 23, 2017
University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce, Microsoft President Brad Smith, and University of British Columbia President Santa J. Ono at the Emerging Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference in Vancouver, B.C., September 20, 2016.
In an expansion of regional cooperation, the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington today announced the establishment of the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative to use data to help cities and communities address challenges from traffic to homelessness. The largest industry-funded research partnership between UBC and the UW, the collaborative will bring faculty, students and community stakeholders together to solve problems, and is made possible thanks to a $1-million gift from Microsoft.
“Thanks to this generous gift from Microsoft, our two universities are poised to help transform the Cascadia region into a technological hub comparable to Silicon Valley and Boston,” said Professor Santa J. Ono, President of the University of British Columbia. “This new partnership transcends borders and strives to unleash our collective brain power, to bring about economic growth that enriches the lives of Canadians and Americans as well as urban communities throughout the world.”
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to use data to help our communities make decisions, and as a result improve people’s lives and well-being. That commitment to the public good is at the core of the mission of our two universities, and we’re grateful to Microsoft for making a community-minded contribution that will spark a range of collaborations,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce.
Today’s announcement follows last September’s Emerging Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference in Vancouver, B.C. The forum brought together regional leaders for the first time to identify concrete opportunities for partnerships in education, transportation, university research, human capital and other areas.
A Boston Consulting Group study unveiled at the conference showed the region between Seattle and Vancouver has “high potential to cultivate an innovation corridor” that competes on an international scale, but only if regional leaders work together. The study says that could be possible through sustained collaboration aided by an educated and skilled workforce, a vibrant network of research universities and a dynamic policy environment.
Microsoft President Brad Smith, who helped convene the conference, said, “We believe that joint research based on data science can help unlock new solutions for some of the most pressing issues in both Vancouver and Seattle. But our goal is bigger than this one-time gift. We hope this investment will serve as a catalyst for broader and more sustainable efforts between these two institutions.”
As part of the Emerging Cascadia conference, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark and Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed a formal agreement that committed the two governments to work closely together to “enhance meaningful and results-driven innovation and collaboration.” The agreement outlined steps the two governments will take to collaborate in several key areas including research and education.
“Increasingly, tech is not just another standalone sector of the economy, but fully integrated into everything from transportation to social work,” said Premier Clark. “That’s why we’ve invested in B.C.’s thriving tech sector, but committed to working with our neighbours in Washington – and we’re already seeing the results.”
“This data-driven collaboration among some of our smartest and most creative thought-leaders will help us tackle a host of urgent issues,” Gov. Inslee said. “I’m encouraged to see our partnership with British Columbia spurring such interesting cross-border dialogue and excited to see what our students and researchers come up with.”
The Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative will revolve around four main programs:
The Cascadia Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Summer Program, which builds on the success of the DSSG program at the UW eScience Institute. The cooperative will coordinate a joint summer program for students across UW and UBC campuses where they work with faculty to create and incubate data-intensive research projects that have concrete benefits for urban communities. One past DSSG project analyzed data from Seattle’s regional transportation system – ORCA – to improve its effectiveness, particularly for low-income transit riders. Another project sought to improve food safety by text mining product reviews to identify unsafe products.
Cascadia Data Science for Social Good Scholar Symposium, which will foster innovation and collaboration by bringing together scholars from UBC and the UW involved in projects utilizing technology to advance the social good. The first symposium will be hosted at UW in 2017.
Sustained Research Partnerships designed to establish the Pacific Northwest as a centre of expertise and activity in urban analytics. The cooperative will support sustained research partnerships between UW and UBC researchers, providing technical expertise, stakeholder engagement and seed funding.
Responsible Data Management Systems and Services to ensure data integrity, security and usability. The cooperative will develop new software, systems and services to facilitate data management and analysis, as well as ensure projects adhere to best practices in fairness, accountability and transparency.
At UW, the Cascadia Urban Analytics Collaborative will be overseen by Urbanalytics (urbanalytics.uw.edu), a new research unit in the Information School focused on responsible urban data science. The Collaborative builds on previous investments in data-intensive science through the UW eScience Institute (escience.washington.edu) and investments in urban scholarship through Urban@UW (urban.uw.edu), and also aligns with the UW’s Population Health Initiative (uw.edu/populationhealth) that is addressing the most persistent and emerging challenges in human health, environmental resiliency and social and economic equity. The gift counts toward the UW’s Be Boundless – For Washington, For the World campaign (uw.edu/boundless).
The Collaborative also aligns with the UBC Sustainability Initiative (sustain.ubc.ca) that fosters partnerships beyond traditional boundaries of disciplines, sectors and geographies to address critical issues of our time, as well as the UBC Data Science Institute (dsi.ubc.ca), which aims to advance data science research to address complex problems across domains, including health, science and arts.
Engineer into the Workforce presentation to The University of British Columbia, School of Engineering, 4th year Capstone Project course. November 2, 2016
Presentation given to today, to the UBC School of Engineering Capstone course
Accelerate Okanagan should be commended for publishing a document, the stated goal of which is to “assist in attracting new talent, companies, and potential investors to the Okanagan, as well to inform policy makers and the media.” Such reports are commonly used to promote a community or region’s economy. However, as with the earlier 2015 report, there are persistent issues, particularly with the industry definition and methodology of the study. The result is questionable data and numbers that simply do not pass a basic “sniff test.” Accepting the results of this study as published may only serve to mislead community leaders on planning, and mislead prospective entrepreneurs considering relocating here.
Problems Persist With New 2016 Accelerate Okanagan “Tech Industry Analysis”
Accelerate Okanagan should be commended for publishing a document, the stated goal of which is to “assist in attracting new talent, companies, and potential investors to the Okanagan, as well to inform policy makers and the media.” Such reports are commonly used to promote a community or region’s economy. However, as with the earlier 2015 report, there are persistent issues, particularly with the industry definition and methodology of the study. The result is questionable data and numbers that simply do not pass a basic “sniff test.” Accepting the results of this study as published may only serve to mislead community leaders on planning, and mislead prospective entrepreneurs considering relocating here.
I taught Industry Analysis at the University of British Columbia, and my entire career has been in high-tech in Silicon Valley and globally, beginning with many years at Intel Corporation, so my assessment is exclusively from a professional perspective. A PowerPoint presentation of my work in this area is posted on this website, under the heading Professional Stuff.
The report begins by explaining that the study was completed by an unnamed third party, apparently affiliated with Small Business BC. A review of the Small Business BC website, staff, and services indicates the organization is almost exclusively organized and resourced to provide services only to individual small businesses. For example, scanning SBBC’s “Market Research” heading, it indicates that its services are focused entirely on smaller scale research for an individual small business, not a large scale analysis of an entire industry in a region. Industry analyses of such scale are better suited to a local educational institution like UBC, with all the requisite skills and resources. Though I have no inside knowledge, it seems reasonable to surmise that some degree of budgetary constraint and political influence were involved in the selection of SBBC, and a desire to emphasize local promotion over objective accuracy.
With regard to methodology and industry definition, the Report states that it follows the methodology of British Columbia’s High Tech Sector Report, the most recent of which is from 2014. A closer look at this methodology can be found on the provincial government website. A separate document is listed, “Defining the British Columbia High Technology Sector Using NAICS,” published fifteen years ago in 2001. My review of this document indicates that while it offers some useful discussion, it is seriously out of date and in need of revision. A more professional approach would have required the development of a more current methodology relevant to the Okanagan situation. The BC methodology document does provide some very cogent cautionary remarks on high-tech industry definition and methodology:
The “high technology” sector is a popular subject of discussion and analyses, partly because it is viewed as an engine of growth both in the past and for the future. However, the high-technology sector has no specific and universally accepted definition. Defining and measuring the high technology sector can be done as part of basic research at the level of individual firms. A second, more “modest” approach uses pre-existing data collected on “industries” which are defined for general statistical purposes. The challenge is to determine which of these industries warrants inclusion in the measurement of the high technology sector.
The AO Report author seems to have accepted both approaches. Page 4 of the Report explains that the author decided to also include “the previous survey undertaken by Accelerate Okanagan.” The previous AO survey was simply a Survey Monkey survey submitted by individual local businesses. The results were apparently compiled without additional professional judgment applied, or follow-up contact with companies by phone or other means and cross-referencing with the more “modest” macro data methodology mentioned in the 2001 BC document. IMHO, if my assumptions are correct, the Survey Monkey data should have been thrown out as unreliable, or regenerated with much greater scrutiny and judgment applied.
Then there is the issue of Kelowna as an employment market, as noted in the recently reported Bank of Montreal (BMO) and BC Business low national and provincial rankings of Kelowna’s employment market. These issues have also been reported in KelownaNow. Hootsuite, whose founder is from Vernon, consciously chose Vancouver to start his company. CEO Ryan Holmes openly admitted that he did not base Hootsuite in the Okanagan because he knew he would not be able to attract the necessary talent here. It is also important to note that a significant number of local business and community leaders met with the BC Labour Minister and reported that their primary concern was a lack of Temporary Foreign Workers, not economic development or the growth of the local high-tech industry.
The AO Report touches on these issues only very tangentially and indirectly in the closing pages. A more credible approach would have been to confront these local problems directly, citing the BMO report for example, and what AO and the community plan to do about it. Clearly, there are unresolved and ignored contradictions with the AO report that damage its credibility and usefulness.
Finally, this week’s media coverage of the report has died down, having duly reported all the desired sound bytes, but a Google search shows that the media coverage has so far been nearly exclusively from the local Okanagan media which does not meet the stated goal of the AO effort to broadcast the promotion beyond the Okanagan.
AO Tech Industry Report Lacks The Rigor Necessary To Give It Much Credibility
Read the AO January 2015 press release and access the full report here
The AO report’s “economic impact” conclusions are based on 2014 Survey Monkey voluntary responses, which are problematic due to an apparent lack of critical assessment. The report does not follow the kind of rigorous industry analysis performed by leading technology consultancy firms like International Data Corporation (IDC)or Gartner. The definition of an “industry,” for example the “automobile industry in Canada,” involves broad activity around all aspects of “automobiles,” but at some point, firms like Kal Tire or “Joe’s Brake Shop” might be excluded from a definition of the automobile industry. The report does not mention the rigor applied to this industry analysis, so the question is left open, “What exactly is the “tech industry” in the Okanagan?” A well-defined $1 Billion industry is the mobile advertising industry in Canada. Is that what we have in the Okanagan? By way of comparison, I reported on New Zealand’s Ice House tech incubator economic impact report, which has much greater credibility. The AO report is essentially claiming that the Okanagan technology economy is more than twice the size of New Zealand’s…That’s too big of a leap of faith for me. Read New Zealand’s Ice House Startups Achieve Impressive Resultsand contrast it with the AO report.
Then there is the issue of Kelowna as an employment market, as noted in the recently reported Bank of Montreal (BMO) and BC Business low national and provincial rankings of Kelowna’s employment market. These issues have also been reported in KelownaNow. Clearly, there are unresolved contradictions with the AO reports.
There is a lot of hubris and fantasy here in the Okanagan that no amount of reality can kill. Contrasted with that is a political faction that wishes for nothing more than the status quo. In yet another example of Kelowna’s long-standing poor employment market, and bizarre claims of being a technology industry hub, high tech employment in the Okanagan is being curtailed by the mass exodus of qualified graduates to employers outside the Okanagan.
Kelowna’s tech industry growth stunted by shallow talent pool
There is a lot of hubris and fantasy here in the Okanagan that no amount of reality can kill. Contrasted with that is a political faction that wishes for nothing more than the status quo. In yet another example of Kelowna’s long-standing poor employment market, and bizarre claims of being a technology industry hub, high tech employment in the Okanagan is being curtailed by the mass exodus of qualified graduates to employers outside the Okanagan. This is not new news as it has been happening for years. The employment and economic development crises are now so severe that it may take a decade or more to reverse. A recent claim that the Okanagan high-tech industry produces $1 Billion in revenue, now seems particularly preposterous. This situation underscores the challenges facing Raghwa Gopal, as the new Director of Accelerate Okanagan. I see that Gopal has so far won a host of community awards and contributed to a local food drive, which leaves me asking which job he is running for, and which job he holds now?
Raghwa Gopal, Director of Accelerate Okanagan
FROM KELOWNA NOW:
A lack of skilled programmers is hampering Kelowna’s ability to establish itself as a technology hub.
According to Barry Ward, the president of Bardel Entertainment, tech companies across the city are desperate for skilled employees, but there just aren’t enough of them to meet demand.
“Everybody’s feeling the pinch for talent,” Ward says. “You’re looking around town for someone with 5-10 years experience and they’re just not there.”
Bardel, the animation company Ward co-founded, has offices in both Kelowna and Vancouver. The company opened its Kelowna office three years ago, looking to expand out of a crowded Vancouver market.
Photo credit: Bardel Entertainment
Vancouver is the undisputed centre of technology in British Columbia but, according to Ward, the overcrowded market there has left an opening for another B.C. city to establish itself as a tech-industry hub.
He believes Kelowna is the perfect city to do that, but says that won’t happen “without an available talent pool” in Kelowna.
Dr. Raymon Lawrence knows that all too well.
Lawrence is an associate professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in the Okanagan, where computer science programs are essentially at maximum capacity.
Lawrence says the university’s computer science department is on track to graduate 30-40 students next year, but that many of the graduates will be scooped up by tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
Photo credit: KelownNow
“Pretty much if any grad wants a job they can get a job within three months,” Lawrence says.With so much lucrative work outside the province, and relatively few skilled workers graduating every year, Lawrence says “there’s a real problem in Kelowna.”
Both Ward and Lawrence say the solution is simple: more people trained right here in Kelowna.
Ward was one of 18 tech industry “leaders” who wrote an open letter to Premier Christy Clark earlier this month asking for more funding and support for technology-related post-secondary programs.
They asked the premier to invest $100 million to grow post-secondary programs in the province, specifically in places like Kelowna.
Early this year, Clark did announce plans to introduce computer coding to B.C. school curriculum, and in 2015 the provincial government created a $100 million venture fund to finance tech startups.
Lawrence says provincial funding aimed directly at post-secondary programs would likely be the only thing capable of spurring growth in UBCO’s computer science programs.
“Unless there’s some money provided to us, we won’t grow,” he said.
Researchers from Google’s AI Lab say a controversial quantum machine that it and NASA have been testing since 2013 resoundingly beat a conventional computer in a series of tests.
Google Says It Has Proved Its Controversial Quantum Computer Really Works
Researchers from Google’s AI Lab say a controversial quantum machine that it and NASA have been testing since 2013 resoundingly beat a conventional computer in a series of tests.
Inside this box is a superconducting chip, cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, that might put new power behind artificial-intelligence software.
Google says it has proof that a controversial machine it bought in 2013 really can use quantum physics to work through a type of math that’s crucial to artificial intelligence much faster than a conventional computer.
Governments and leading computing companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google are trying to develop what are called quantum computers because using the weirdness of quantum mechanics to represent data should unlock immense data-crunching powers. Computing giants believe quantum computers could make their artificial-intelligence software much more powerful and unlock scientific leaps in areas like materials science. NASA hopes quantum computers could help schedule rocket launches and simulate future missions and spacecraft. “It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” said Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
Biswas spoke at a media briefing at the research center about the agency’s work with Google on a machine the search giant bought in 2013 from Canadian startup D-Wave systems, which is marketed as “the world’s first commercial quantum computer.” The computer is installed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and operates on data using a superconducting chip called a quantum annealer. A quantum annealer is hard-coded with an algorithm suited to what are called “optimization problems,” which are common in machine-learning and artificial-intelligence software.
However, D-Wave’s chips are controversial among quantum physicists. Researchers inside and outside the company have been unable to conclusively prove that the devices can tap into quantum physics to beat out conventional computers.
Hartmut Neven, leader of Google’s Quantum AI Lab in Los Angeles, said today that his researchers have delivered some firm proof of that. They set up a series of races between the D-Wave computer installed at NASA against a conventional computer with a single processor. “For a specific, carefully crafted proof-of-concept problem we achieve a 100-million-fold speed-up,” said Neven.
Google posted a research paper describing its results online last night, but it has not been formally peer-reviewed. Neven said that journal publications would be forthcoming.
Google’s results are striking—but even if verified, they would only represent partial vindication for D-Wave. The computer that lost in the contest with the quantum machine was running code that had it solve the problem at hand using an algorithm similar to the one baked into the D-Wave chip. An alternative algorithm is known that could have let the conventional computer be more competitive, or even win, by exploiting what Neven called a “bug” in D-Wave’s design. Neven said the test his group staged is still important because that shortcut won’t be available to regular computers when they compete with future quantum annealers capable of working on larger amounts of data.
Matthias Troyer, a physics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, said making that come true is crucial if chips like D-Wave’s are to become useful. “It will be important to explore if there are problems where quantum annealing has advantages over even the best classical algorithms, and to find if there are classes of application problems where such advantages can be realized,” he said, in a statement with two colleagues.
Last year Troyer’s group published a high-profile study of an earlier D-Wave chip that concluded it didn’t offer advantages over conventional machines. That question has now been partially resolved, they say. “Google’s results indeed show a huge advantage on these carefully chosen instances.”
Google is competing with D-Wave to make a quantum annealer that could do useful work. Last summer the Silicon Valley giant opened a new lab in Santa Barbara, headed by a leading academic researcher, John Martinis (see “Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum Computer”).
Martinis is also working on quantum hardware that would not be limited to optimization problems, as annealers are. A universal quantum computer, as such a machine would be called, could be programmed to take on any problem and would be much more useful but is expected to take longer to perfect. Government and university labs, Microsoft (see “Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics”), and IBM (see “IBM Shows Off a Quantum Computing Chip”) are also working on that technology.
John Giannandrea, a VP of engineering at Google who coördinates the company’s research, said that if quantum annealers could be made practical, they would find many uses powering up Google’s machine-learning software. “We’ve already encountered problems in the course of our products impractical to solve with existing computers, and we have a lot of computers,” he said. However, Giannandrea noted, “it may be several years before this research makes a difference to Google products.”
My biggest complaint with venture capital and the current entrepreneurial landscape is the lack of Big Ideas— the superficiality of the technology sector. “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” –Peter Thiel. We also got corporate greed masquerading as “the sharing economy.” Many other well-known observers of this industry share my complaint. Some argue that these Big Ideas are too big for private investment, and can only be funded by governments with the resources and vision to accomplish such large long term projects. I disagree.
My biggest complaint with venture capital and the current entrepreneurial landscape is the lack of Big Ideas— the superficiality of the technology sector. “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” –Peter Thiel. We also got corporate greed masquerading as “the sharing economy.”
Many other well-known observers of this industry share my complaint. Some argue that these Big Ideas are too big for private investment, and can only be funded by governments with the resources and vision to accomplish such large long term projects. I disagree. The semiconductor industry, on the bleeding edge of quantum mechanics, was funded almost exclusively by private venture investors. Another example may be nuclear fusion. Large-scale projects, like ITER, funded by the European Union at the Cadarache facility in southern France, and the National Ignition Facility in Livermore California, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy are being seriously challenged by Canadian and U.S. startups funded by private venture capital, and seeking to beat the large projects to the goal of renewable solar energy.
Tim Draper of Draper Ventures at General Fusion
Start-Ups Take On Challenge of Nuclear Fusion
Michl Binderbauer of Tri Alpha Energy, a fusion start-up.
A group of start-ups is promising a new and virtually unlimited source of power, one that produces none of the gases scientists say contribute to global warming.
The only problem? A way to harness the energy source, nuclear fusion — the reaction that gives birth to sunlight — still needs to be invented.
Such an achievement has long evaded government scientists and university researchers, despite decades of work and billions of dollars in research. But backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and some of the wealthiest people in the technology industry, a handful of young companies say they can succeed where government has fallen short.
Nuclear fusion is one of many areas of science and energy now getting the backing of venture capitalists. The investor dollars coming into fusion start-ups, like those in many areas of science, still pale in comparison with the money spent by governments. But signs of progress, including some results that have eclipsed government projects, have generated hope among some scientists that the companies could help develop a fusion reactor within their lifetimes.
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The C-2U machine at Tri Alpha Energy
At the very least, they talk a confident game — even though the history of fusion science is littered with frustration and false starts. Some fusion scientists, unable to evaluate the start-ups’ unpublished scientific results, doubt the companies’ chances.
“The fusion era is here and coming,” said William D. Lese, a managing partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm with a stake in General Fusion, one of the leading start-ups in the field. “The increase in activity in this space is perhaps a sign of that.”
Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms are squeezed together so tightly that they merge. That single, larger atom releases a tremendous amount of energy.
This happens naturally at the center of the sun, where gravity easily crushes hydrogen into helium, spewing forth the sunlight that reachesEarth. But on Earth, making hydrogen hot and dense enough to sustain a controlled fusion reaction — one that does not detonate like a thermonuclear bomb — has been a challenge.
The potential upsides of the power, though, provide a huge incentive. Fusion reactions release no carbon dioxide. Their fuel, derived from water, is abundant. Compared with contemporary nuclear reactors, which produce energy by splitting atoms apart, a fusion plant would produce little radioactive waste.
The possibilities have attracted Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. He has invested in General Fusion, a start-up in British Columbia, throughBezos Expeditions, the firm that manages his venture capital investments. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, is betting on another fusion company, Tri Alpha Energy, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles, through his venture arm, Vulcan Capital.
Peter Thiel — the co-founder of PayPal, who once lamented the superficiality of the technology sector by saying, “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” — has invested in a third fusion start-up,Helion Energy, based near Seattle, through Mithril Capital Management.
Government money fueled a surge in fusion research in the 1970s, but the fusion budget was cut nearly in half over the next decade. Federal research narrowed on what scientists saw as the most promising prototype — a machine called a tokamak, which uses magnets to contain and fuse a spinning, doughnut-shape cloud of hydrogen.
Today’s start-ups are trying to perfect some of the ideas that the government left by the wayside.
After earning his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1990s, Michl Binderbauer had trouble securing federal funds to research an alternative approach to fusion that the American government briefly explored — one that adds the element boron into the hydrogen fuel. The advantage of the mixture is that the reaction does not fling off neutrons that, like shrapnel, can wear down machine parts and make them radioactive.
Mr. Binderbauer, along with his Ph.D. adviser, Norman Rostoker, founded Tri Alpha Energy, eventually raising money from the venture capital arms of Mr. Allen and the Rockefeller family. The company has raised over $200 million.
“We basically said, “What would an ideal reactor look like?’ ” said Mr. Binderbauer, who is now the company’s chief technology officer. Mr. Rostoker died late last year.
General Fusion is pursuing an approach that uses pistons to generate shock waves through the hydrogen gas. Compressed hard enough, the hydrogen atoms will begin to fuse. General Fusion has raised about $74 million from private investors and another $20 million from the Canadian government.
Its reactor concept, like that of Tri Alpha Energy, would yield power plants much smaller than a commercially viable tokamak, which would need to be larger than many stadiums are in order to work. General Fusion’s idea to compress a ball of hydrogen, too, is borrowed from a government project aborted decades ago. The company’s innovation on that approach is to use cannon-size pistons for the compression.
Critics in the nuclear physics field say it is unlikely start-ups will succeed with these alternative approaches.
“They just keep pounding on the same dead horse,” said Edward C. Morse, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “What happens in fusion is that the same ideas pop up every two decades. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.”
In addition, private funds cannot match those of the most ambitious government fusion energy project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, a stadium-size tokamak being built in France by the European Union, along with the United States and five other nations, for about $14 billion. The United States is committed to funding about 9 percent of the project.
Still, the Energy Department is also hedging its bet, granting $30 million to alternative fusion projects, including Helion Energy, which received $4 million.
“In all of our selections, it’s not about a start-up versus something else,” said Eric A. Rohlfing, deputy director for technology of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the government agency that made the grants. “It’s about the quality of the idea.”
The start-ups counter critics by saying that they can be more efficient than government projects.
When Tri Alpha Energy’s panel of outside advisers visited the construction site of the company’s lab in 2007, the concrete was still being poured. Some advisers doubted the company would be conducting experiments within a year, as Mr. Binderbauer said they would.
But by the following year, the machine was ready. “When I walked these guys out there to see that, their jaws dropped,” Mr. Binderbauer said.
“I do recall being surprised by how fast they said they would get the facility ready,” said Burton Richter, a professor emeritus at Stanford and Nobel laureate in physics who advised Tri Alpha Energy.
This past June, Tri Alpha reached a new milestone: Its machine superheated a ball of hydrogen to 10 million degrees Celsius and held it for five milliseconds — much longer than government projects achieved using the same method.
“You may ask: ‘Five milliseconds? That’s nothing.’ Certainly, that’s the blink of an eye to a layperson,” Mr. Binderbauer said. “But in our field, that’s half an eternity.” His next goal is to increase that temperature tenfold.
Other fusion efforts have set even more ambitious goals. When Lockheed Martin announced its own fusion project last year, the company said it expected to build a prototype within five years.
But history would suggest that struggles lie ahead. For example, the American government’s other major approach to fusion, used by a California lab that fires 192 giant lasers at a container holding hydrogen to compress and fuse it, missed a 2012 deadline for producing more energy than the lasers put in.
That checkered past is not stopping the start-ups.
“We’re moving very quickly,” said Michael Delage, vice president for strategy at General Fusion. “Is it two years away? Three years away? Four years away? Maybe. We’ll let you know when we get there.”
This issue has driven me absolutely nuts since I first arrived in Canada from Silicon Valley. It did not take me long to figure out that things did not work they way they did in California, and that there wasn’t much of a true entrepreneurial economy here. Since then, I have also been appointed to the Canada Foundation for Innovation grant process, providing me with insight into how R&D funding works in Canada. I have seen many issues in Canada that have impaired the nation’s ability to develop an entrepreneurial culture, among them is the inherent Canadian conservatism and short term horizon of investors unfamiliar with technology venture investment. But none has been worse than Canada’s decades-long neglect of adequate funding for research and development nationwide.
UPDATE: May 21, 2015. As if to drive home the Canadian economic crisis, Goldman Sachs has just released an oil price forecast suggesting that North Sea Brent crude will still be $55 in 2020, five years from now. As Alberta Western Canadian Select (WCS) bitumen is valued lower on commodity markets this is extremely bad news for Canada. Further, the well-known Canadian economic forecasting firm, Enform is predicting that job losses across all of western Canada, not only Alberta, could reach 180,000.
This issue has driven me absolutely nuts since I first arrived in Canada from Silicon Valley. It did not take me long to figure out that things did not work they way they did in California, and that there wasn’t much of a true entrepreneurial economy here. Since then, I have also been appointed to the Canada Foundation for Innovation grant process, providing me with insight into how R&D funding works in Canada. I have seen many issues in Canada that have impaired the nation’s ability to develop an entrepreneurial culture, among them is the inherent Canadian conservatism and short term horizon of investors unfamiliar with technology venture investment. But none has been worse than Canada’s decades-long neglect of adequate funding for research and development nationwide. A review of the OECD data on Canada’s investment in R&D compared to other industrialized nations paints a sorry picture. This has led directly to a poor showing in industrial innovation and productivity. This is further compounded by the current government’s myopic focus on natural resource extraction, Canada’s so-called “natural resource curse.” The result now is an economic train wreck for Canada. The fossil fuel based economy has collapsed and is not forecast to recover anytime in the near future. During the boom time for fossil fuel extraction, there has been essentially no rational strategy to increase spending on R&D and innovation, and hence no increase in economic diversification. Now the problem is nearly intractable, and may take decades to reverse.
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL, by Bruce Smardon, McGill-Queens University Press
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL explains that since 1960, Canadian industry has lagged behind other advanced capitalist economies in its level of commitment to research and development. Asleep at the Switch explains the reasons for this underperformance, despite a series of federal measures to spur technological innovation in Canada. It is worth noting that Arvind Gupta, President of The University of British Columbia, and former head of MITACS, the organization at UBC tasked to promote R&D, has also been an outspoken proponent for increased R&D, at one point editorializing in the Vancouver Sun, that Canada needed an innovation czar, to promote innovation in the same manner as the 2010 Seize the Podium program to enhance gold medal performance for Canada.
Also, as a member of the 2012 Canada Foundation for Innovation Multidisciplinary Assessment process, and the University of British Columbia 2015 CFI grant preparation process, I can say without reservation that the Canada suffers from inadequate R&D funding and its consequences.
ANALYSIS From CBC News
Canada’s research dilemma is that companies don’t do it here
Ten-year study says repairs needed for rebound will be costly and difficult
REBLOGGED: By Don Pittis, CBC NewsPosted: May 15, 2015 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: May 15, 2015 6:31 AM ET
Northern Electric was a domestic Canadian technology success story that became the telecom equipment giant Nortel Networks. But when Nortel failed, the lack of an R&D hub meant there were no startups to replace it. (The Canadian Press)
As Stephen Harper handed out more tax breaks for Canadian manufacturers in Windsor, Ont., yesterday, you might ask, “With that kind of support, why is Canada’s industrial economy in such bad shape?” Political economist Bruce Smardon thinks he has the answer.
Smardon says companies operating in Canada just aren’t spending enough on domestic research and development, and the Harper government is only the latest in a long line of governments, stretching back to that of John A. Macdonald, that have contributed to the problem.
As China’s resource-hungry economy goes off the boil, taking Canada’s resource producers with it, everyone including Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz, has been waiting for a rebound in Canada’s industrial economy.
But there are growing fears such a Canadian rebound is not on the cards. As the Globe and Mail’s Scott Barlow reported last week (paywall), despite having the top university for generating new tech startups, Canada has repeatedly failed to become a hub for industrial innovation.
Best in North America
Interviewed by the New York Times, the president of the startup generator Y Combinator, Sam Altman, called the University of Waterloo the school that stood out in North America for creating new ideas that turned into companies.
But as Barlow reported, there is statistical evidence that Waterloo’s success has not translated into R&D success, as Canadian industrial innovation continues to decline.
Political science professor Bruce Smardon’s book, Asleep at the Switch, examining Canada’s R&D failure, has been short-listed for one of Canada’s most prestigious academic prizes. (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
And, believe it or not, Smardon traces the chain of events back to Canada’s first prime minister and his tariff policy of 1879. Paradoxically, those rules were put in place to protect Canadian manufacturers from cheap U.S. goods, that were in turn protected by U.S. tariff walls.
Central Canadian boom
For the industries of central Canada, the tariff barriers worked. In the years before the First World War, says Smardon, Canada was second only to the United States in creating an economy of mass production and mass consumption, where workers could afford to buy the products they produced.
However, prevented by tariffs from exporting U.S. goods to Canada, American companies did the next best thing. They started, or bought, branch plants north of the border, wholly- or partly-owned subsidiaries that used U.S. technology in Canadian factories.
Smardon says that started a trend that continues today. The majority of R&D was being done in the home country of the industrial parent, not in the Canadian subsidiaries. And in the Mulroney and Chrétien era of free trade, he says, relatively high-tech branch plants, such as Inglis and Westinghouse, started to close as products were supplied more efficiently by the U.S. parent factories.
There were Canadian R&D stars such as Nortel and Blackberry, says Smardon. But they were exceptions. And when those stars began to set, the lack of a traditional R&D hub in Canada meant there were few young research-based companies ready to come up and replace them.
Tax credit paradox
The paradox, he says, is that Canadian taxpayers have spent a fortune on R&D tax credits. The 2011 Jenkins report showed that as a percentage of GDP, Canadian R&D tax incentives were higher than anyplace else. But as Barlow showed, Canadian R&D still lags behind.
The reason, Smardon concludes, is that while taxpayers fork out for R&D, industrial R&D doesn’t happen here but in traditional R&D hubs abroad. He says that free trade agreements and a longstanding view by Canadian governments that business knows best mean it’s very difficult to put conditions on how that money is spent.
“If we are concerned with developing a manufacturing base in the more advanced research intensive sectors, we’re going to have to have incentive programs at the very minimum, that are clear in insuring that any incentives are used to develop products and processes in Canada,” says Smardon. “They’ve got to think through how that can be done.”
But Smardon is not optimistic. He says that free trade and the free market philosophy has become so entrenched in Canadian thinking that it’s impossible to change.
Market rules
He says that is why the Harper government became so enamoured with the business of pumping and exporting unprocessed oil and gas while the Canadian industrial economy crumbled. It was exactly what the global free market wanted.
It may indeed be that global market forces decide Canada is an icy wasteland that is best at producing raw materials. It may decide that the best way to use our brilliant young people is to send them to California to develop their business ideas there.
But if we want more than that, perhaps handing out ineffective tax incentives is not going to be enough.
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Inside this box is a superconducting chip, cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, that might put new power behind artificial-intelligence software.
mayo615 