Edmonton Economic Development Corporation

Innovation Policy and Workplace Development in Finland – A Short Look at the Current Situation and a Possible Future

re-casting the speed-dating model to help skilled newcomers connect with potential employers and circumvent the usual barriers that accompany a resume filled with foreign work experience and education.

event is expected to include more than 100 newcomers looking for work in Canada and a similar number of executives and managers from 65 different companies. With four different rooms devoted to information technology, sales and marketing, engineering and finance

he biggest barrier to getting work in their field is their need to connect with people in their profession

Both SFMade and its New York cousin, Made in N.Y.C., are increasingly able to share success stories of how manufacturing has developed new models for doing business in the 21st century. The monolithic single-industry model has evolved as manufacturers see the benefits of being smaller and paying attention to how patterns of consumption, ownership and use are shifting.

“For decades we have developed a culture of disposability — from consumer goods to medical instruments and machine tools. To fuel economic growth, marketers replaced longevity with planned obsolescence — and our mastery of technology has given birth to ever-accelerating unplanned obsolescence. I think there is increasing awareness that this is no longer sustainable on the scale we have developed.”

“It’s not some cute cottage industry,” she says, referring to the prevailing tendency to view “local” as something generally limited to cupcakes, jam or “My Mom Went to _____ And All I Got Was This T-Shirt.” The “number one thing we do,” Sofis continues, “is facilitate new connections.”

Labour costs can’t be avoided Why are local labour markets key to containing inflation? When demand picks up in Alberta, imported goods can simply be ramped up as well. The cost of a Toyota didn’t change significantly in ’08, for instance. Conversely, the cost of a haircut, building a high-rise or an up-grader all increased substantially. High labour costs for non-tradable goods and services simply can’t be avoided.

We’re not yet at the point where the Alberta labour market is strained because  natural gas is still down and governments have cut back so the added activity can likely be accommodated without causing wages to spike. Unfortunately, that can change quickly. Thankfully, while confederacy doesn’t always lead to an optimal interest rate for western Canada, it does provide a pressure release valve through inter-provincial migration.

People relocate for a variety of reasons (family, education, etc.), but, typically, there are three main economic drivers: wages, cost of living and the unemployment rate, which are all linked to one another. For instance, what’s the point of having a higher average wage if it is entirely eaten up by higher living expenses, and wages might be higher in another province, but if they’re not hiring there’s not much point relocating.

This report examines the evidence from a wide range of international and Canadian research on "green" jobs and the economic impacts of climate policies. The report finds that Canada’s governments could create more jobs by implementing strong climate policies than by continuing with business as usual.

We told you before that research shows America's long-term unemployed citizens frequently end up depressed, dejected, and more unlikely to look for jobs as time drags on

My own research has documented the connection between a large-scale presence of the creative class of workers -- people who work in science and technology; business and management; arts, culture and entertainment; medicine and education -- and the prosperity of cities. But it's about more than prosperity. Once a certain threshold of income is met, our research finds, the work people do plays a substantial role in their happiness, over and above the effect of income at the national6, state7, and city8 levels. Our findings here reinforce and confirm this conclusion. There is a substantial positive correlation between city happiness and the share of creative class jobs (.5) and a significant negative one between well-being and the share of working class jobs (-.4).

composition of city job markets plays a considerable role in our sense of well-being as well.

cities with more blue-collar economies have been among the hardest hit by the economic crisis. Unemployment is high, incomes are lower.  Workers in these kinds of jobs have faced much greater trouble finding new jobs (the unemployment rate for production workers is 10 percent; for construction workers it tops 20 percent). Not only do these workers have skills and incomes which are tied to their specific jobs, many in these areas are trapped in underwater homes and unable to relocate to areas with more work and greater opportunity:  Hardly a recipe for happiness

The shift will enable the university to reduce infrastructure costs, which should lead to some broader cost savings (he noted that no positions would be lost) and some productivity gains, as the mundane task of managing email can now be removed.

The US economy did not have a conspicuous unemployment problem until the crisis of 2008 because the non-tradable sector absorbed the bulk of the expanding labor force. That pace of employment growth now appears unsustainable. Government and health care alone accounted for almost 40% of the net increment in employment in the entire economy from 1990 to 2008. Fiscal weakness, a resetting of real-estate values, and lower consumption all point to the potential for long-term structural unemployment.

Restoring elements of manufacturing competitiveness is hard. Once skilled labor, training programs, and technical institutions in specific industries are gone, it is difficult to get them back. Long-term policy should include an evolving assessment of competitive strength and employment potential across sectors and at all levels of human capital, with the goal of encouraging market outcomes that achieve social objectives.

Does higher productivity destroy jobs? Sometimes, but only in the very short term

We are optimistic about productivity because it isn’t only about efficiency; it is no less about expanding output through innovations that improve the performance, quality, or value of goods and services. What’s more, even productivity solely from efficiency gains can, in the aggregate, lead to higher employment if the cost savings are put back to work elsewhere in the economy. Companies can pass on those savings to their customers in the form of lower prices, leaving households and businesses with more money to spend elsewhere. They can also reinvest savings from more efficient operations in new job-creating activities.

The largest productivity gains since 2000 came from sectors that have seen substantial employment reductions (Exhibit 2). Computers and related electronics, the rest of manufacturing, and information sectors contributed around half of overall productivity growth since the turn of the century and reduced employment by almost 4.5 million jobs. More than 85 percent of them were lost even before the recession’s onset. The sectors that added the most employment during this period tended to be those with lower productivity—notably the health sector.

Policy makers pinning their hopes on cutting-edge “clean” technologies to create jobs on a large scale are likely to be disappointed. Innovation in R&D-intensive sectors can play a vital role, enabling productivity gains and consumer benefits in the economy more broadly—think IT. But such sectors alone are simply too small to make an economy-wide difference in growth and employment.

In the past, it has too often been hit or miss because it was based solely on a macroeconomic view—whether one country is more competitive than another.

The quest for new jobs, for example, is much more likely to bear fruit in large local-business and household-services sectors, where regulation can have the most direct impact.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.

As the economy slowly recovers from the recession, we need to do what is necessary to achieve a solid recovery in the short term and to begin repairing our provincial fiscal situation. But our long-term challenge remains – raising our productivity, which is synonymous with improving our innovation capabilities and performance. Robust innovation results can be achieved through more key business investments and by the right government policies and strategies for innovation. The Report concludes that businesses need to step up their investments in technology – from R&D to patents to adapting existing technology to their businesses. Equally important is the ongoing need to develop stronger management capabilities in our businesses. The Task Force also recommends that governments improve their innovation polices by shifting their efforts from new-to-the-world inventions to relevant-to-the market innovations. These are the key conclusions of the Ninth Annual Report, Today’s innovation, tomorrow’s prosperity, released today by the Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress.

WiganPlus is an exciting new scheme that rewards people who live and work within Wigan for continuing to shop in our local town centre. With exclusive promotions from Arriva on local bus travel to Wigan town centre and exciting offers and incentives from the towns favourite retailers, WiganPlus makes local loyalty more rewarding. 

Performance reviews corrupt the system by getting employees to focus on pleasing the boss, rather than on achieving desired results. And they make it difficult, if not impossible, for workers to speak truth to power.

performance preview. Instead of top-down reviews, both boss and subordinate are held responsible for setting goals and achieving results. No longer will only the subordinate be held accountable for the often arbitrary metrics that the boss creates. Instead, bosses are taught how to truly manage, and learn that it’s in their interest to listen to their subordinates to get the results the taxpayer is counting on.

Instead of the bosses merely handing out A’s and C’s, they work to make sure everyone can earn an A. And the word goes out: “No more after-the-fact disappointments. Tell me your problems as they happen; we’re in it together and it’s my job to ensure results.”

Sustainable Happiness: How Happiness Studies Can Contribute to a More Sustainable Future This paper provides the rationale for integrating sustainability principles with happiness studies. Examples of sustainable happiness in practice are provided as well as recommendations for further applications.

Corporate Service Corps, through which the company disperses small teams of high-performing employees, for weeks at a time, to help communities around the world address economic and societal challenges. The mission of these teams combines corporate responsibility with leadership training and business development—representing a new integration of the company’s business and societal goals.

That work roster suggests why the Corporate Service Corps represents not only cutting-edge career training but also a major advance in the practice of corporate social responsibility. The latter has come a long way over the past 100 years. A century ago, businesses answered only to their shareholders, and philanthropy was a personal (and primarily financial) matter for wealthy industrialists and their companies. However, over the course of the twentieth century, the most enlightened corporations came to see developing responsible relationships with society as an important element of how they defined themselves. Today, engaging with society has increasingly become an essential part of doing business, woven into every decision about how the organization operates.

For IBM, the company gains experienced leaders, inspired employees, insights into new markets.

Skilled jobs will go to the lowest bidder worldwide. A decline in middle class pay and job satisfaction is only just beginning

Americans are about to suffer a profound shock. For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards. If they work hard enough, each generation can still do better than its parents. All that is required is to bring schools up to scratch and persuade universities to teach "marketable" skills. That is the thinking behind Michael Gove's policies and those of all his recent predecessors as education secretary.

"Knowledge work", supposedly the west's salvation, is now being exported like manual work. A global mass market in unskilled labour is being quickly succeeded by a market in middle-class work, particularly for industries, such as electronics, in which so much hope of employment opportunities and high wages was invested. As supply increases, employers inevitably go to the cheapest source. A chip designer in India costs 10 times less than a US one.