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our stories
Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.
RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.
RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.
C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.
About the C100:
C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.
our stories
Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.
RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.
RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.
C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.
About the C100:
C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.
Sometimes, it seems, revolutions can be described in haste.
While the onslaught of Massive Open Online Courses back then seemed like a death knell for traditional learning, mass online learning has struggled in its infancy, while demands for colleges and universities has never been greater.
Now that educators are settling in for the long haul of disruption, they’re discovering that technology and teaching go hand in hand. American MOOCs — led by Coursera and Udacity — are turning to pay models, more rigorous standards and better links with established schools. And post-secondary institutions are breaking down their own walls, equipping students, and teachers, with the power of technology to personalize learning, speed up instruction and reach the critical scale needed to amass enough data to make even greater leaps in the quality of education.
The latest #RBCDisruptors, featuring edtech pioneer John Baker and York University president Rhonda Lenton, asked if the post-secondary model is broken. The answer: in places. And it can be fixed.
Baker, who is the founder and CEO of D2L, a digital learning platform, believes the model can be improved dramatically through new ways of teaching and learning. Lenton, who took over the top job at York this summer, feels that while the model is not broken, it needs to change and evolve, which she argues, is already happening.
“Incremental change,” she said, “is happening but we are not yet seeing fundamental change.”
Here are some of the tougher issues they’re taking on:
Technology as Teacher
Like practically every other sector, technology is increasing its presence in the classroom, helping to personalize the learning experience by providing better ways of engaging students and enabling them to learn better.
Baker noted that instructing all students at the front of a classroom makes it very difficult to personalize to individual needs — such as tailoring lessons and giving real-time feedback.
Baker, who founded D2L while in his third year of studies at the University of Waterloo, also said that technology makes learning accessible to the blind, deaf and visually impaired, allowing them to move through learning as quickly as everyone else in the class. It also provides predictive data to understand a risk of a student dropping out of a class, by allowing the teacher to identify the warning signs early on, and uses AI to reach out to the student with personalized interactions.
Experience as Educator
Lenton emphasized that the term ‘experiential education’ (EE) cannot be narrowly defined. EE requires an entirely different partnership model between higher education and outside sectors, and should include public sector and non-profit organizations, not just businesses.
“The day of the ivory tower university is long gone,” said Lenton. What she predicts will happen is an increasing fluidity of campuses and outside sectors working together to shape the curriculum.
“York University has in fact made a commitment that over the next five years, every single program will have an EE component,” she said.
Flipping the Classroom
Rather than students spending all of their time in the classroom with an instructor at the front, they now can get the materials online, and use the class time to work together and apply their learnings. Think less one-to-many lecturing, and more using the physical classroom space to work collaboratively.
Baker believes that less time spent learning in the classroom is a big improvement on how the traditional model works, as time is our most precious commodity.
Campus of the Future
Both agreed that physical space will always play a large role in student experience.
“The one thing students don’t want to lose is the face-to-face opportunity to work together,” said Lenton.
Baker predicts that in the next five years, 50% of students’ course load will be done online, and universities may not need to build a new building every time they add thousands of new students. “It gives universities the ability to scale,” he said.
The Value of Education
Lenton, a first-generation student from a family of five siblings, always understood the incredible opportunity that higher education affords, in giving access to a research-intensive experience, and allowing one to realize their full potential.
“University graduates do very well,” she said, pointing out that 91% of university graduates are employed within three years of graduation, and that 86% of students are in an occupation related to their career.
Income-wise, Lenton noted, university graduates earn about $1 million more over their lifetime than college graduates, and about $1.5 million more than someone with a high school education.
From Courses to Competencies
Baker believes the largest opportunity in education is a shift to the outcome-based model for learning. This means moving away from “seat times” and pass/fail measures, and much more towards a competency-based model.
“When you graduate university you no longer are going to say, ‘I took this course and this program’, but, ‘I have these skillsets, I can think critically, here’s my research ability, and here’s my portfolio of all the work that I’ve accomplished’. That language is consistent with what you’re going to see later in life.”
Lenton added that universities are about providing students with transferable skills that will allow them to be flexible and adaptable to the fact that careers are changing constantly.
Disruption for Good?
“We really don’t see disruption as a negative. We see disruption as an opportunity to be embraced,” said Lenton.
Baker concurred, “sometimes we think about disruption as this painful thing we have to go through, and sometimes it is. But it’s also probably the single biggest opportunity in front of our educational institutions, and I can’t think of a bigger market opportunity for them to pursue than going through this transformation.”
What Is the Single Biggest Change You Have Seen in Post-Secondary Education Over the Past Decade?
Rhonda: By far, the biggest change has been the disruptive change of technology. Technology has changed the way we share information, how we collaborate on research, and it shapes our priorities. Technology has also facilitated and enhanced the globalization of education, and given the increased focus on international education and international opportunities; as a post-secondary institution in Toronto – Canada – our diversity is a strength. John: The biggest shift has been the shift to digital, to online education. Today’s post-secondary students live an “on demand” life, whereby they can access almost any kind of content – either music, videos, books – on their own time and in their own place. That means that the ability to learn and study is not necessarily accommodated any longer by a traditional model of regularly scheduled, in-class, daytime classes, but more of an “anytime/anywhere” access to the information, the labs, and the profs.Will the University Campus Still Be Recognizable in 20 Years? Will There Even Be Campuses?
John: We believe that the physical university campus that we know of today will still have its place, but it will evolve, and may not be the norm as we know it today. Given that more and more learning is moving online, for example, there will be far fewer in-person lectures. While gathering for purposes of a shared experience is incredibly valuable on many levels, whether it is to learn, go to a live concert, see a play, or gather in peaceful demonstration, the old model of everyone attending a class at the same time on the same day just doesn’t match with the trends we’re seeing around the world for a personalized, learner-centric model that delivers the content in a much more flexible way to the learner. Rhonda: While the days of the ivory tower are gone, we still value face to face connection and in-person learning experience. We are in a time of transformative change – including the physical spaces that support higher education, but I see more growth, integrated technology, and improved access to information as complementary to our increasing focus on experiential education and the high demand for hands on learning experiences from both students and employers.Do You Believe in Mandatory Coding Classes for Elementary School Children?
Rhonda: Higher education must keep pace with the fast changing demands of today’s society. I am a sociologist and an educator, passionate about teaching and learning. I believe k-12 curriculum must also change and adapt to ensure students have the basic skills needed to succeed. John: Coding is another form of literacy – in this case, digital literacy. And digital literacy provides a core foundation for so many of the tools we use today, and will use tomorrow. This doesn’t mean everyone has to become a coder, but learning the fundamentals will help people speak the language of the future. And, importantly, including it for all kids, girls and boys, will help fill the “top of funnel” pipeline problem for girls getting into STEM programs. Coding will teach kids the competencies and skills demanded for the future world of work, including critical thinking and problem solving. Those are lifelong skills that everyone needs.
our stories
Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.
RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.
RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.
C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.
About the C100:
C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.
our stories
Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.
RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.
RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.
C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.
About the C100:
C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.
1. Survivor: It’s the Story of Every Entrepreneur
Vinod Khosla, the billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said those who want to build successful companies have to stick it out at all costs. It’s not about getting lucky; it’s about survival. “You only control three of the top ten things that determine if you’ll be successful as an entrepreneur,” he said. “For many entrepreneurs, what’s important is to stay alive long enough to get lucky.”
2. Preparing Society for the AI Revolution
Artificial intelligence may be one of the most disruptive economic forces we’ll see in our lifetimes, and the social dislocation will impact every business. Few economists see evidence of mass job loss because of AI — now or in the foreseeable future. But they agree it is about to profoundly change the nature of work, and therefore the value of work. Rather than unemployment, a key economic statistic to watch will be income disparity. Integrate.AI founder Steve Irvine said he’s not a believer in the AI Armageddon, but every employer and entrepreneur needs to understand the social impacts: “The people will rise up before the robots do.”
3. Focus on Talent, the Machines Can Take Care of Themselves
Work is three things: problem-solving, performing tasks, and using your skills. Gary Bolles, a San Francisco consultant and founder of SocialCapitalMarkets.net, believes AI will replace more tasks than jobs — and so the onus is on us to continue to change the nature of our jobs and continue to learn through our careers. Self-Inventory 101 is the number one class necessary for elementary schools kids to succeed in the future, Bolles said. Self-inventory enables youth to identify skills they have and those they need, promoting life-long learning and enabling career mobility in a fast-changing labour market.
4. When Disruption Goes to School
Elevate Toronto speakers Ananya Chadha, 15, and Gaurav Dogra, 14, have resumes most college graduates would be envious of. Chadha is already working on a team at Toronto’s SickKids hospital that edited the gene for muscular dystrophy out of mice. Dogra has founded two companies and is working on tough questions in virtual reality. But neither of them can find the courses in high school or university to satisfy their curiosity. “If we’re learning in school what you were learning in school, we have a problem,” Dogra said.
5. Will Cryptocurrency Be the Next Big Thing?
Ted Livingston has built one of Canada’s most successful tech companies on the back of social chat, the biggest platform of the past decade. He thinks the next frontier is cryptocurrency, and has launched Kin, his attempt to connect the world financially. He’s already raised more than $100 million from 17,000 people in 139 countries, yet Canada isn’t one of them. Despite our strong financial institutions and world-respected regulators, we’re too cautious when it comes to crypto, Livingston said. His proposal for Kin was rejected by the Ontario Securities Commission, one of the only regulators in the world to do so, he said.. “This is a problem for Canada: When someone starts to innovate, we say, “Ooo, there’s risk, shut it down.”
6. Cyber-Risk: An Existential Threat (and Opportunity) to Every Business
Hacking and data loss are a risk to every enterprise, not just the big names that make headlines. Melissa Hathaway, who was Barack Obama’s cyber adviser, says we’re on the brink of a new, and far more dangerous, age. At the Waterloo Innovation Summit, she recalled how the U.S. privatized its Global Positioning System in 2000, not appreciating how the mobile and cloud revolutions were about to open the floodgates to online attackers. She worries the coming Internet of Things revolution — think connected clothing — will take hacking to a frightening new place, and worries the world is not even talking about it. Hathaway thinks the best hope may lie with entrepreneurs trying to foil the dark hats. “We need to be talking about how the next generation of innovators can help us.”
7. How Canada Can Focus on Winning, Not Whining
Investor and entrepreneur Anthony Lacavera said Canada need to protect its interests and stop leaking economic value to foreign powers. That means investing in innovators, from better support for startups at the growth stage to building Canada’s brand as a leading country for innovation. Canadian modesty is our worst trap: we need to embrace competition, double down on winners, move up the value chain, spend to foster and retain talent, and commercialize our R&D. Entrepreneur Dan Debow said if we can build 10 AI companies the size of Shopify within 10 years, we’ll know we’ve won.
8. Diversity Becomes Canada’s Killer App
Canada’s open doors and open minds are such a rarity in today’s world that they’ve become a strategic asset. Razor Suleman, who returned to Toronto from Silicon Valley after selling his start-up, said Canada’s diversity and inclusion sets us apart at a time when America and parts of Europe seem headed in the opposite direction. AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio cited Canada’s open arms as a key selling point when he tries to lure the world’s best and brightest to Montreal. Jordan Jacobs, founder and CEO of AI startup Layer 6, said his company’s first 11 hires were born in different countries — an unintentional diversity marker that came from hiring the best people for the job.
9. A Sea-Change on Sexism
Actress Amanda Crew is known for her role as one of the handful of women on HBO’s male-dominated tech startup satire “Silicon Valley.” She says that her role on the show woke her up to the challenges of female founders and investors, and she’s now put her own money beyond women working in the Valley. A series of high-profile scandals, along with the broad reach of social media, have brought attention to the need for men and women to step up and call out sexism where they see it. There’s hope, she said: “This younger generation is growing up with this conversation so loud that they’re aware of it from the beginning.”
10. Innovation Without Purpose Is Not Innovation
J.B. Straubel, the co-founder and technical brains of Tesla, concluded the Waterloo Innovation Summit with a simple message to entrepreneurs: if you’re not passionate about what you’re building, drop it. At Tesla, he and Elon Musk are not out to build a car company. They’re out to save the planet. “Follow your passions and carefully choose what projects you want to pursue,” he said. Julie Hanna, the CEO of micro-lending sensation Kiva, gave a similar message to the Elevate crowd. Through a global digital network, Kiva has created $1 billion (US) in loans to help 2.5 million entrepreneurs — 83% of whom are women. “Technology is the most democratizing force in the history of human kind.”
Take employers. Across every sector, companies, governments, and non-profits take diversity as seriously as payroll, law, and marketing. It’s an important function to keep the machine well-oiled; just not to rethink the machine.
If Canada’s to become an innovation nation, diversity and inclusion will need to be part of that machine.
According to new RBC research, which surveyed 64 major Canadian employers, nearly 90% strongly believe diverse and inclusive teams make better decisions, while 66% strongly believe and another 20% agree leveraging diverse backgrounds and individuals is fundamental to their organizations’ performances. Half of respondents take diversity seriously enough to use scorecards to track their annual performance.
Yet only a handful of employers see inclusion — what you do with all that diversity — as a core part of strategy. It’s a talent tool, something to leave with HR.
The full results of our survey will be released at the 6Degrees conference on diversity, in Toronto in late September.
To understand the thinking behind the numbers, we held a roundtable this week with two dozen leading employers, ranging from Maple Leaf Foods to the City of Toronto, and several diversity experts.
One conclusion: Few Canadian firms have been able to turn diversity into inclusion. Fewer still are even thinking about how to turn inclusion into innovation.
“If diversity lies in HR, it dies in HR,” said Deanna Matzanke of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion.
And that’s a risk, to economic growth, among other things.
Many employers are pursuing diversity for good but insufficient reasons. Attracting talent. Retaining people. Pleasing clients. In other words, not to disrupt their businesses.
And yet, the economic payoff is way more than productivity. A diverse group of engaged employees is more likely to solve a business challenge than a genius lone wolf can.
Inclusion – a squishy word for most – is about getting those employees engaged, and leveraging each other.
EY, the accounting and consulting giant, is one of the world’s more enlightened employers when it comes to inclusion and innovation. (The firm included a Muslim prayer room in its new downtown Toronto office tower.)
“If people’s minds are elsewhere, they won’t be as effective at work,” said Sadaf Parvaiz, EY’s director of inclusion.
The firm is under pressure from clients and millennial staff to promote diversity, and do something with it.
The retail giant Loblaw Cos. is figuring this out in real time as it digests the acquisition of Shoppers Drug Mart and thinks ahead to a new era of competition from the likes of Amazon. The company can’t move fast enough.
While the grocery business is as diverse as any on the frontlines, that diversity – whether it’s ethnic or gender — tends not to move up the ranks. Loblaw’s new President Sarah Davis is trying to change that, but inclusion isn’t just about getting different people together and making them feel comfortable. It’s finding a new whole that’s greater than the sum of the diverse parts.
Corus, the media and entertainment conglomerate, is looking at a very different future for its business, and trying to find ways to get diverse groups of employees to rethink it. But the company admits it’s early in the journey, and was able to get going really only after its acquisition last year of Shaw Media.
Meanwhile, one of Canada’s best new hospitals, Toronto’s Humber River, is discovering the hard way that innovation is about people more than technology. Its building and equipment – touted as North America’s first digital hospital — are among the best anywhere. But because Humber River serves one of Toronto’s poorest and least educated districts, it hasn’t hired many locals, and realizes now it lacks the diversity needed to think through the most innovative and practical ways to apply a digital hospital to the area it serves.
Among the suggestions:
Get the strategy group to make diversity and inclusion their own priority
Adopt innovation metrics to see how inclusion is paying off
Make it a central part of every leadership discussion
Promote a questioning culture, to engage the minds of the many, not just those who think they’ve got it figured out
Measure, measure, measure. Compensate accordingly. Repeat.
Ironically, Silicon Valley – so often lambasted for an abusive and exclusionary culture – has set the standard for harnessing minds and passions of the many, and calling it innovation.
Canada now has a chance to apply that disruptive thinking to diversity, by leveraging talent rather than just adding it.
As Silicon Valley leaders like to say, innovation is about multiplication, not addition. Same goes for real inclusion.
