We hear people say, ‘Well, what we need are scientists and engineers running these companies because these are tech companies.’ But if we in Canada would like to have companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco and Intel, find out how many of their CEOs have science and tech degrees. The answer is there are a lot more MBAs than science and technology degrees.
What is the link between what other countries spend on business and their performance?
If you look at the economies outperforming us on innovation, they produce way more highly educated managers. Our managers are terribly educated in comparison and far less likely to have business education. We ruthlessly ration our business education. Students really want a business education and can’t get it, especially in Ontario.
We’ve tracked down all the high tech start-ups in the province that have prospered and interviewed them all to figure out what they felt was missing. It wasn’t qualified scientific and technical personnel and it wasn’t researchers or labs or local technology suppliers – it was managerial talent to hire.
Wouldn't some people argue leadership comes as much from the liberal arts and other social sciences?
We’re getting liberal arts education, but the arts are getting an incredibly rich allocation of the money at all levels. It is only business that is not.
Of all the money given out by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a big federal grants program, nine times more has gone to arts and literature than to business. I am not even talking social and human sciences – that is 41 times.
The view is that having educated managers is not relevant to economic success. We assume we need educated lawyers to have good law firms; we need educated scientists to have good science; you need educated engineers to have good engineering, but in business it is assumed you do not need education.
What do the scientists say about this innovation gap?
They say it is because we are not investing enough [in science]. But actually, our funding of university research is proportionately higher than in the U.S. If we only invested still more, they say, we would outperform. We have an innovation crisis in this country and these people say that we still haven’t invested enough in science.
But don’t business schools have access to higher, privatized tuition, and richer donors, than many other faculties?
The real question is not whether Canadian business schools have an economic advantage over Canadian non-business schools – it is how they compare with U.S., British, European and other business schools. If Canadian business schools are disadvantaged economically against foreign schools, they won’t be able to hire world-class faculty, or provide world-class student services, etc. And then they won’t get and keep students and faculty that are really top-notch. They will be mediocre and won't help Canadian company competitiveness at all.
And Canadian business schools are extremely stretched and massively underfunded compared to the leading tier of business schools internationally. We are doing our very best to keep up and actually create world-class programs, but basically only three business schools in Canada are globally consequential. And the two-year tuition freeze in Ontario (where the three are located) and the complete bypass of business schools in federal funding make it really tough.
