For the past three months I’ve been flying back and forth between Brasilia and Toronto, working with a great team here in Brazil on a project we are calling Educacao Livre (or the Free Education Project): a project that we hope will ignite economic opportunity and promote social inclusion by providing digital skills training for some 2 million young people who are currently underserved by or excluded from Brazil’s education system. Back in Canada, we [...]

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The big data revolution arguably hit science before it hit other institutions. Powerful scientific instruments and pervasive computing have driven quantum leaps in the amount of data available to scientists, raising new challenges for researchers who have had to develop new methods, tools and institutions for managing and exploring massive datasets. Thankfully, their efforts are surfacing valuable lessons for open data innovators in other fields such as public administration, journalism and health care. In the [...]

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In the formative years of the industrial revolution it quickly became evident that economic progress depended upon substantial investments in public goods. The economy needed a growing supply of educated workers, so the government created public education. The expansion of trading relationships was made possible, in part, because traders could rely on the judicial system to mediate commercial disputes. Meanwhile, America’s continental network of roadways, railways and power grids helped create the dynamic continent-wide market [...]

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America’s infrastructure problem is truly serious and perhaps more dire than Obama let on in his State of the Union address earlier this week. What’s worse, is that for all the talk of Sputnik moments and restoring America’s competitiveness, I didn’t hear much about the kind of infrastructure investments that could really boost America’s innovation potential. Sure, Obama talked about building a network of high-speed commuter trains. But that’s in the “nice-to-have” rather than the [...]

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As one watches the events unfold in Cairo, it’s impossible not to feel sympathy for the Egyptian citizens who want, more than anything, to share the values of freedom and openness, but must risk life and limb to do so. For me, freedom is the most important human aspiration. No one should be denied the right to determine their own destiny, to be free of oppression or to enjoy bedrock liberties like the right to [...]

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In my previous post I discussed why the Obama administration is right to make renewing America’s regulatory system a priority. We already have a situation where citizens armed with information are drawing attention to many important fissures in the global economy that threaten to undermine global peace and stability, issues such as climate change, food security, water scarcity, and corruption. They are increasingly willing and able to contribute to solving these issues, and they are [...]

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Earlier this week Obama issued a call to renew America’s regulatory system and not a moment too soon. A string of events over the past couple of years have underscored just how strained and ineffectual the current systems of regulation have become. The FDA’s own Science Board concluded in 2007, for example, that the agency did not have the capacity to ensure a safe food supply, with domestic businesses under its purview having risen to [...]

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In the wake of yet another massive disclosure of compromising US government secrets, it’s worth reflecting on whether Wikileaks is helping or in fact undermining the transparency movement in the United States and abroad. To conclude that Wikileaks’ unapologetic disclosures are undermining transparency is admittedly a counter-intuitive. After all, the self-proclaimed “intelligence service of the people” has, in just a few short years, released more than a million confidential documents, from highly classified military secrets [...]

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This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week and rightly so. Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of a dynamic economy and society and the key to solving some of the world’s toughest challenges. Indeed as the global economy continues to sputter, it’s clear that we need entrepreneurialism more than ever. A study done last year by the Kauffman Foundation shows the extent to which job creation depends on new business creation. Using Census Bureau data, the Foundation examined [...]

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Last week I had a conversation with the Toronto Star about a Facebook app being used by California Democrats to mobilize supporters in the run-up to this week’s mid-term elections. The app, called Friend Out the Vote, is designed to sift through a user’s friends list, match it with friends’ party registrations and affiliations and voting histories, and develop a list of people who vote Democrat but don’t vote regularly. I talked about why Facebook apps alone [...]

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