Canada’s Workforce Crisis: Moving from Conversation to Action
This video by Lemay Media and Millier Dickinson Blais digs deeper into the need for a Canadian national workforce strategy. Read the full blog post
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The Iceberg Dilemma
I’ve often had colleagues tell me that I am passionate about workforce issues. I can’t argue with them, especially when I find myself thinking about it when I wake up in the early morning hours. What is it that keeps me awake at night? I call it the “Iceberg Dilemma”. Read the full blog post
From red flags to green (Part 2): how to see into the invisible economy
Last month, I had the chance to speak at the annual conference of the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) in Houston, Texas, with a focus on the question of how and why Business Retention and Expansion (BR+E) is evolving to be more effective in the new economy.
I’ve had a lot of requests for transcripts and copies of the speech but I generally don’t speak from notes, so I promised I’d provide an overview of my thoughts on this blog. Here’s the second of three blog posts that will cover off the main ideas and themes of that presentation… Read the full blog post
Art is to Culture as Baseball is to Sport: the ‘Arts Plus Swindle’
Deborah Mills, a leading researcher and analyst of cultural planning in Australia, wrote a wonderfully rich and revealing article in 2002 entitled Cultural Planning – Policy Task Not Tool. After a decade of cultural planning in Australia, the paper examined why many cultural plans had failed to realize their promise. Read the full blog post
Collaboration
This past week I tuned into the Country Music Awards – who would have thought that watching the CMA’s would have brought my thinking to collaboration? Well, it did. Read the full blog post
The cultural economy and its global reach
There’s been no shortage of attention in Canada and the United States about the growing importance of creative cultural industries in economic development at a local, regional and national level. I assumed that the rapid expansion of these industries and recognition of their economic significance was being felt more in ‘industrialized’ or ‘developed’ countries than in emerging economies. Well, I stand corrected! Read the full blog post
Assessing Impacts in Creative Placemaking
My last blog dealt with ‘creative placemaking’, which is receiving increased attention in both Canada and the United. The belief is that creative placemaking can produce a wide range of positive outcomes at a neighbourhood or district level. Some of these outcomes include job creation, strengthening networks, building social capital and community capacity. While there are many individual projects that have demonstrated success, there is movement on both sides of the border to establish a more empirical base of evidence to substantiate the merits of creative placemaking. Read the full blog post
Are you Going to MapThat? Application of GIS in Economic Development
IBM estimates that we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. In case you’re wondering, that’s 18 zeroes to the left of the decimal. This data is generated from cell phones, governments, digital sensors in objects, the pictures we post to face book and all those tweets about Justin Bieber. Read the full blog post
Where are the Answers?
Knowledge Exchange on Workforce and the Economy – Building Collaboration through Conversation
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The Future of the Canadian Dairy Industry’s Supply Chain Management is up for Discussion
The Conference Board of Canada released a briefing report in the summer that provides a good historical review of Canada’s dairy industry. This industry’s supply management system was created in the 1960s and early 1970s, but prior to 1960 the industry was a supplier of dairy product exports to the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Supply management was created to protect dairy farmers from excess production capacity for serving the Canadian market. Read the full blog post
