Innovation Agenda should focus on humanities

November 30, 2016

Earlier this year, the government of Canada launched its Innovation Agenda, actively soliciting advice from the public on how to increase the country’s profile as a world leader in innovation, including how to improve the role of the education system in raising the next generation of tech leaders. Some academics have raised concerns about the role that the humanities and social sciences play in creating a more robust version of innovation warning about the misgivings of every educational institution in the country sacrificing literature and the arts in order to simply teach everyone how to code or become engineers. David Wolfe, University of Toronto political science professor and co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab was part of a recent discussion at a workshop called “Strengthening innovation through scholarship and community”, part of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2016 annual conference at Hart House earlier this month. The full article is available here.