Let us begin by being clear about what a start-up is.A start-up is generally a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. It may be a service company for seniors, a technology company or a company selling
a particular product. As a start- up, it does all the work needed to get to and stay in a market and learn what it will take to go from a small business to a medium-sized, fast growing business and then to a large business. A start-up is a temporary since the way it works will not be the way the medium and larger scale versions of the business work. Think of Apple, which began with two
young men building interesting machines and selling them via friends and their social networks, and look at Apple now! Think of Costco / Price Club, which began in 1976 with a single warehouse, and look it at now – a very different kind of global business.
A start-up of this kind is not the same as a small business offering a product in a single market – a one-off business. The strategic intention of a start-up of the kind we are describing here is to move from small to large, from local to national and then global, and from a single product to a range of related products.
Welcome to Teaching, a newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week Dan describes one reader’s intriguing idea to improve course evaluations, Beckie shares how some of you make use of brain research in your teaching, and we look at the month ahead.
Abstract Research suggests that cultural issues can make or mar the open innovation process. In this paper, we thus aim at identifying organizational culture types that enable and retard the two types of open innovation activities: in-bound and out-bound. Data were collected using the questionnaire survey method from 339 middle and top managers working in the Malaysian high-tech sector.Organizational culture emerged as a huge predictor of open innovation. We found that highly integrative culture enables in-bound open innovation, but does not significantly affect out-bound open innovation. Besides, hierarchy culture is found to retard both in-bound and out-bound open innovation. This paper is probably the first to empirically investigate the role of culture in open innovation. The findings fill an important gap in open innovation theory while practical implications extend to managers interested in open innovation adoption in their organizations.
A Q&A with Peter Cornish of Memorial University on the Stepped Care model, which he hopes will get everyone on campus to be part of the support system for those dealing with mental health issues.
In 2014, Peter Cornish helped the Student Wellness and Counselling Centre at Memorial University launch the Stepped
Care program. With this model, the level of intensity of care is matched to the complexity of the condition. When someone
says they are stressed, or they are not feeling happy, then society tends to say, “Okay, go see a psychologist,” said Dr.
Cornish, who is director of the counselling centre. However, not everyone needs to see a therapist all of the time. The Stepped
Care model brings in many other “low intensity” options for the patient that are readily available in the community, but which
we’re often not making use of. University Affairs sat down with Dr. Cornish to find out more about the Stepped Care model and
why universities should consider it.
One day this past March, a middle school student placed a new Air Jordan on his desk at school in Montgomery County, Maryland. The boy, who is Latino, became fixated on the shoe, rubbing the leather and fingering the laces. His teacher, who is white, asked him to put it away, but the boy refused. He became “combative,” according to the teacher, and a tug-of-war ensued. Security was called to remove the shoe.
In schools, a tussle over a shoe or a phone can quickly escalate—sometimes to a suspension or worse—leaving educators, parents, and students wondering what went wrong. As research is finding, these pervasive misunderstandings can be rooted in assumptions and biases about race and culture, and have the potential to alter
the course of students’ lives.
At age 18, Kimberly could no longer come up with a reason to live.
The Toronto university student locked the door to her parents’ garage, stepped onto a stool in the middle of the room and looped an electrical cord around her neck.
“It’s something I couldn’t explain,” recalls Kimberly, who asked that her last name not be published. “I didn’t understand what was going on in my head . . . You want to give up.”
Within seconds, she heard a faint scratching on the garage door. It was her cat.
“He knew something was wrong,” she says. “I took the cord that I wrapped around my neck off and I went inside.”
Two years later, the now third-year student at Ryerson University has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and depression.
She’s part of what some experts are calling an emerging phenomenon.
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is proud to release the 2018 edition of Habitats: Students in Their Municipalities. This annual publication is comprised of a series of case studies on municipal-level topics and issues affecting undergraduate students. Written by students from OUSA’s member institutions, these submissions aim to highlight both successes and challenges in municipalities across Ontario, providing insight into how students feel about issues within their communities.
predictable political camps. Gun-rights advocates called for expanded mental-health services, insisting that no law could have stopped an obvious madman like Paddock. Nonsense, gun-control supporters said; whatever Paddock’s mental state, the easy availability of firearms makes violence more likely.
I’ve been thinking about this debate following a recent suicide on my own campus, the University of Pennsylvania, where at least 14 students have taken their lives since February 2013. Whenever a suicide happens, the spotlight turns to mental-health services. Do students know whom to call in times of crisis? And are there enough services for
everyone who needs them?
Despite our best intentions every university president (or chancellor) eventually leaves the job. Most presidents are more than happy to retire into the sunset after a decade of fundraising, strategic visioning and crisis management. Others return to their research or are recruited elsewhere to lead another organisation.
Whatever the cause – and we must admit the cases where controversy cuts short the presidential term – at some point universities will find themselves in need of a new leader. The majority of institutions have detailed policies outlining the search process, but there are often bumps along the way.
Often the most challenging factor is the imperfect transfer of knowledge between committee and board members in charge of the search process. Fortunately, some recent research in the Canadian context highlights key techniques to facilitate a successful search process when choosing a new university president.
Online learning has reached a tipping point in higher education. It has grown from a peripheral project of early tech adopters or a practice of the for-profit industry into an accepted way of delivering education that is now deeply embedded in the majority of colleges and universities.
In the past fifteen years, there has been a shift in the way researchers have conceptualized identity, moving from the “identity-as-thing” to an under-standing of “identity-in-practice” (Leander, 2002, 198–199). This is not necessarily a new concept, as earlier researchers recognized sociocultural influences on perception (Bartlett, 1932/1995; Vygotsky, 1978) and on the performative nature of identity (Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1959). New Literacy Studies theorists (Barton, 1994, 2001; Gee, 1996, 2000; Street 1995, 1999) began to examine identity-in-practice in relation to literacy. In addition, ethnographic accounts (Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1997; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) began to document ways that literacies and identities were interconnected. There was an epistemolog-ical shift, underscoring the individual and community practices that help to shape one’s identity. Literacies included all activities inside and out-side school, highlighting the relationship between people’s literacy prac-tices and their situated actions, behaviors, beliefs, and values, or their Discourses (Gee, 1999, 2008, 2011).
As the number of faculty members whose position lies outside the tenure system continues to rise at American universities, college deans, department chairs and program directors must consider how to support the careers of these colleagues. The differences that commonly exist between the opportunities available to tenure-system faculty and those offered to other academics can be a recurring source of friction. That not only erodes unit cohesion and climate, but it may also impede efforts to retain valued long-term employees who are not in the tenure system.
Since the configurations and names of these people and positions vary widely across disciplines and institutions, I will denote them collectively as “academic staff.” At Michigan State University, we have several categories of faculty members who work outside the tenure system -- including outside professionals in business, law, medicine or media who teach an occasional career-oriented course in their specialty; instructors with full teaching loads and short-term contracts; and individuals with a mix of teaching, advising or other duties who have long-term appointments. As a dean, I have seen that as my college hires more faculty members outside the tenure system, identifying ways to support such academic staff professionally is an increasingly common topic of conversation. And as an associate provost, as well, charged with advancing the careers of all MSU faculty and academic staff, I am finding support for academics outside the tenure system to be an area of institutional concern.
Teachers around the world are now commonly subject to standards defining their role and activity in terms of the effective application of the most efficient teaching methods, in terms of optimizing inputs and outputs, means and ends. Measures of student learning and competencies, of the “value” that can be “added” by teachers to student test scores have become the currency for educators and administrators alike. Little room is left, it seems, for the unintentional and involuntary, for student individuality and autonomy—for anything outside of the quantifiable ends and the presented means for their attainment. For example, besides tying teacher remuneration to student outcomes, the US No Child Left Behind policy mandates “scientifically based” instructional strategies—ones that tightly script lessons in ways that exclude teacher and student spontaneity.
MONTREAL -- It’s not whether to talk to students about sensitive current events like the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., but how. That was the upshot of a panel called “Teaching in Our Contemporary Moment” here Monday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
“You have to talk about those things in your class,” said Tanya Golash-Boza, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, who specializes in race and immigration. “Whatever you think of sociologists, they’re more socially aware than the biologists and the computer scientists … You have to remember that sociology is a place where students come to talk about what happened yesterday, what happened last week.”
In an increasingly complex, networked, and rapidly changing world, creativity has taken a central role (Dortier 2015; Runco 2004). There is enormous interest in creativity in education, business, technology research, and emerging fields such as social innovation and design. Coupled with a proliferation of popular as well as academic discourses of creativity, this situation presents researchers with complex, multidimensional challenges that cannot be addressed exclusively from the perspective of one discipline. This new global context requires a transdisciplinary exploration of creativity, particularly since the articulation, expression, and practice of creativity appear to be in flux in society as well as in academia. The networked society, generational differences, and the focus on business innovation have turned attention to collaborative, distributed forms of creativity that have only recently begun to be studied systematically.
Last month , I opened up about one of the side effects of doctoral study that I hadn’t anticipated: the Ph.D. identity crisis.
With the date of my dissertation defense looming in four months, I’d begun to realize that I couldn’t answer two rather important questions:
Who am I outside of "Ph.D. Candidate"?
What do I want out of life and this degree?
Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in all its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. Because . . . technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he reg-isters his demands on it. (Benjamin, 1936/2008, p. 242)
Why we need to promote socioeconomic diversity.
Sarah Green Carmichael, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, recently talked with Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, about her new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, which examines how class divisions affected the recent election. Ms. Williams contends that liberals have long been hung up on identity and cultural issues at the expense of socioeconomic ones. While she believes that eliminating racial and gender inequality is a good thing — she’s a progressive and a feminist, after all — she suggests that there’s been a blindness to class inequality, which is alive and growing in America. As one example, she points to a recent study of fictitious résumés, which found that male law students from privileged backgrounds were far more likely to get callbacks for coveted internships at top law firms than their working-class counterparts were. Socioeconomic bias is all too real, she argues, yet many corporate and college diversity efforts tend to overlook it. It’s time to expand diversity programs to include class, she tells Ms. Carmichael.
Emotional blackmail is not a pleasant thing to encounter, and many of us succumb to it without even realizing it at various stages in our lives. The truth is that there are many manipulative people out there, who seem to thrive on getting a one-up over someone they deem to be vulnerable and/or they feel they can take something from. As a result, emotional blackmail is something you should do your utmost to avoid. If you think you’re already in such a situation, you need to be able to recognize the signs to identify
emotional blackmail and put an end to it. Here is our guide to dealing with emotional blackmail:
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and
the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR