McMaster University is taking a lead position on an innovation policy on behalf of 50 business schools in Canada.

McMaster is one of only two schools chosen — University of Ottawa is the other — to provide business-school input to the federal government. The university hosted a federal summit on innovation last Tuesday.

McMaster hopes to submit its paper to other business schools, with the final version to go to Ottawa before a national conference on innovation, likely in November in Toronto.

Ottawa is pushing cutting-edge innovation and knowledge-enterprise in research schools and Canadian companies. Without new products and services, Ottawa is saying, Canada will slip in its standard of living among the great economies of the world.

What McMaster is telling Ottawa is that it must give equal weight to how companies take innovations to market. In general, innovation relates to new products, new services or new technologies that have gone to market and been adopted into commercial use.

“Eighty per cent of good inventions fail because somebody has not bothered to look at this from the invention-to-market stage,” says business dean Vishwanath Baba. He is chair of the Ontario Council of Business School Deans, representing 17 schools in the province.

(The Hamilton Spectator, Sept. 24, 2002)