MaRS, space and "social" innovation

Millenium Sholarships

Last Friday, I spoke on a panel about innovation at the “Think Again” conference in Ottawa – an event organized by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation. The Foundation was set up in 1998 by the Federal Government as an independent entity with two critically important goals:

1. improve access to post-secondary education and;
2. promote and recognize student excellence.

Each year the Foundation’s Excellence Award Program disburses $15 million worth of merit scholarships to over 2000 post-secondary students with high marks, high levels of community engagement, demonstrated leadership and an interest in innovation. More than 270 of these students converged in Ottawa last week, and I was lucky enough to get to speak to them about innovation – along with Tim Broadhead (head of the McConnell Foundation in Montreal), Catherine Lang (whose most recent work has focused on the Innovative Rural Communities Project) and our moderator Tonya Surman ( ED of the Centre for Social Innovation).

The young Canadians that filled our session were an amazing group: dynamic, engaged, articulate leaders who had already demonstrated a willingness to engage in the problems affecting their communities. Reflecting on our session, I was struck by their focus on three points:

• In fostering innovation, space matters. I’ve blogged on this before, but the impact of design, construction, layout and decoration on the collaboration process is one of the biggest surprises I’ve found while working at MaRS – and a core part of our strategy that the CMSFers grasped immediately.
• “Innovation” is far more than another word for “science and technology.” Students at the conference were already aware that they would have multiple careers, in multiple industries and across multiple sectors. And they were equally convinced that innovation was ultimately about both devising new solutions to old problems and focusing on implementation and impact to create sustainable change.
• Cultivating a tolerance for risk is essential to fostering a culture of innovation. We spend considerable time talking about risk: how to identify it and mitigate it, how to use networks and community to insulate against it, and how to welcome risk as an essential ingredient in urgency – the imperative that drives all manner of innovation in any context.

This group of young people are the next generation of MaRtians: I hope to see them at MaRS when their ideas and their passions turn toward commercialization. It was inspiring to be a part of this conversation with such sophisticated, experienced youths with such optimism about their futures.

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Tags: awards & competitions, communities, education, leadership, public sector, ross wallace, social entrepreneurship, Social Innovation