I’ve recently had the luxury of diving into the Naomi Klein’s international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

A well researched and an engaging read, this is not a very cheerful, but certainly a thought-provoking, book. It highlights the subtle power of academia in the society. Take, for example, Chicago’s School of Economics record of influence under the intellectual leadership of Milton Friedman. Or, say, the power of a particular funding mechanism in shaping scientific inquiry and controlling access to new knowledge and ideas.

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Archimedes and his Eureka! moment

Genius may be 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, but that 1% is pretty critical. Jonah Lehrer examines the science behind inspiration in a recent piece in The New Yorker (pdf here).

For scientists from Archimedes to Newton, moments of sudden insight have led to incredible breakthroughs. Now, neuroscientists at Northwestern and MIT are piecing together how these insights actually occur. Their research suggests that insights originate in the brain’s right hemisphere, the region involved in making broad and novel connections, while the prefrontal cortex, which regulates brain activity, instantly recognizes the insight and makes your conscious mind aware of it.

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Collaboration is very easy to talk about. It’s on everyone’s lips.

Making collaboration work beyond the handshake – particularly across fields and fiefdoms – is much tougher, requiring a fine balance of skill, respect, neutrality and, underlying it all, trust.

As a start-up with an ambitious mandate – building global companies from Canadian innovation – MaRS has certainly worked collaboratively to bring talented, committed people from different spheres together through inventive on-site programming, expanding and leveraging professional and personal networks, and fostering an active online community at marsdd.com that now draws in excess of 400,000 page views a month.

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Ontario is a “hotbed of research”

Ontario is one of the world’s 20 best biotech places, according to the June 2008 report issued by Genome Technology Online.

Our province was given a high ranking due to a large number of resident biotech companies (120 private and 26 public companies), the presence of major research initiatives such as the Ontario Genomics Institute and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the creation of a biotech-focused zone in downtown Toronto anchored by our own MaRS Discovery District.

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If you’re a scientist — and even if you have just peaked into the science world from time to time — you KNOW Nature, the mammoth scientific publishing group. But did you know about their social media tool for scientists, Nature Network? It’s hopping with important conversations and meaningful connections. Some call it the Facebook for scientists.

Until recently, you could only join Boston and London (UK) hubs on the Nature Network. Everyone else was dumped into the “global” category. Now, they’re opening up hubs for the city that brings the most members to the community. And we’re thinking Toronto should be the next big science city on the list!

So why Nature Network?

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Corn Flakes: A thing of the past?

We’ve all heard ominous news of a global food crisis: rice riots, school lunch programs shutting down, hoarding and the like. We’ve also heard heated grumblings about the role of biofuels and speculators. What is making food prices rise, what are the consequences, and what can Canada do to respond? To get to the bottom of these questions, I attended the MaRS Global Leadership Series event, Rising Food Prices: Global Dynamics & Canada’s Response.

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Design thinking in innovation, explored by students developing the Massive Change exhibition, 2003

How can we better understand the mysterious process of innovation? At the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity we believe that the key, capable of unlocking some of innovation’s hidden secrets, is design thinking. In the coming months, we’ll be doing a series of guest posts in which we’ll aim to explain the role of design thinking in innovation, point to some of design’s triumphs, and seek to raise awareness about design’s dependencies and limitations.

Let’s begin by making a distinction between innovation and invention.

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Seen this guy lately?
Photo courtesy k.lammy

I came across an article in Monday’s Globe that had me do a double-take for a couple of reasons. One was because I came across a familiar face in Lisa Crossley, President & CEO of Natrix Separations – a biotech company commercializing unique chromatography technology. In the article, Crossley goes on to discuss her entrepreneurial path as well as share some insights on commercializing a Canadian technology.

The other reason I was taken aback was because I was staring down at a biotech start-up’s female CEO. A female leader in a technology start-up is a bit of a mythical creature, like Polkaroo - “A woman who started a tech company was here? And I missed her again?!”

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Physicist Stephen Hawking in Zero Gravity, NASA

There have been rumors that the world renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, is unhappy with the state of British science funding and has been offered a position at our own Perimeter Institute, located in Waterloo.

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Want to find out about what’s happening in research in Toronto? The University of Toronto’s Experience Research site, which links the research communities of their three campuses, has recently undergone a fantastic redesign.

Along with this redesign comes volumes of information about U of T’s diverse research endeavors, including environment, health, science & technology and business.

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