Industry Canada Research Articles

A systematic literature review on Engineering Entrepreneurship Education Learning Outcomes and Assessment Tools

Recent technological advancement is moving our society towards a more innovative and entrepreneurial one. As a result, engineering entrepreneurship education gained popularity and adoption across major education institutes worldwide. Based on a national survey done by Industry Canada, over 98% of Canadian post-secondary institutes offered at least one course in entrepreneurship. Despite this wide adoption, we believe the research on the short-term learning outcomes and assessment for engineering entrepreneur education on students is inadequate. This is often because of the lack of research in the engineering entrepreneurship and the lack of definition of engineering entrepreneurship education learning outcomes. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis of 123 studies on entrepreneurship education for undergraduate engineering students in North America in the past 15 years. We examined the learning outcomes defined and desired by major entrepreneurial educational institutes in North America and the assessment methods employed to measure the student learning outcomes. We particularly focused on the alignment between desired learning outcomes and assessment methods employed to study the validity and reliability of common assessment instruments. In this paper, we report on the results of the systematic literature review, identify the strength of common assessment instruments, and then describe the process we incorporate what we learned from this review into our engineering entrepreneurship education program.

Everything Old Is New Again: Does The ".Sucks" GTLD Change The Regulatory Paradigm In North America?

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Small Business and Social Enterprise: To Thrive Not Fail

<p>Small businesses (those with up to 99 employees) are the most common business type in Canada – comprising 97.9 per cent of businesses, and contributing close to one-third of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP). Yet a significant number of these businesses fail, with only about 50 per cent lasting at least five years, according to Industry Canada. Social enterprises – businesses that provide valuable products or services while delivering social and sometime environmental returns – struggle even more than small businesses to attract finance, grow, and sustain. What are the similarities and differences between these two groups’ needs, and how can Canada’s three levels of government and the broader business ecosystem better support small businesses and social enterprises to thrive? This paper takes a comprehensive look at key business needs, barriers to success, enabling factors, and policy incentives, drawing upon academic literature, studies and reports from the government, non-profit, and social enterprise sectors, as well as recommendations from business advocacy groups primarily from Canada and the United States. </p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Small business, social enterprise, business financing, business growth, business ecosystem, procurement policy</p>

Author Correction: Reconstructing quantum states with generative models

In the version of this Article originally published, the following sentence in the Acknowledgements was incorrect: ‘Research at Perimeter Institute is supported through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research & Innovation.’ It should have read: ‘Research at the Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade.’ This has now been corrected.

Remote Rural Broadband Systems in Canada

The Rural Remote Broadband Systems (RRBS) program is a unique Canadian initiative to provide broadband access to unserved and underserved regions via fixed wireless service operating on unassigned television frequencies in the 512-608 MHz and 614-698 MHz bands. RRBS operators pay a nominal annual fee to access spectrum and receive a secondary license that offers no guarantee of protection from interference from broadcasting services.In 2011, the year the program was launched, Industry Canada issued 555 licenses for RRBS operations across the country. By 2014, there were 84 RRBS stations in Canada, the majority of which were concentrated in the province of Alberta. In December 2014, Industry Canada placed a moratorium on granting more spectrum licenses for RRBS operations while it examined the potentials of repurposing the 600 MHz band. As of August 2015, there were 52 RRBS stations operating in Canada.This study’s objective is to evaluate the RRBS policy as a method to bring efficient and affordable wireless internet service to remote and rural regions of Canada. This research looks at service providers at the margins of the Canadian wireless industry. Most RRBS providers in Canada are small enterprises that are often run by a few individuals and can have customer bases of less than one hundred. Despite the limited economic potential, early results show RRBS providers remain positive about its possibilities, if given the necessary policy support. This project explores the development of these small enterprises, RRBS business practices, as well as the continued role of the Canadian federal government in developing broadband infrastructures in remote and rural areas. The results of the study include quantitative data collected via surveys of RRBS service providers across Canada, and qualitative information obtained via structured interviews.Among the key questions: What precipitated the enormous drop in interested RRBS providers between 2011 and 2014? Can a secondary licence offer reliable service? Why are so many RRBS providers concentrated in the province of Alberta? What is the role of the federal government in supporting the development of small wireless providers? Is there a viable economic model to provide wireless broadband service in remote regions?This research is the only known study of this unique Canadian wireless broadband initiative. This study contributes to international telecommunication research involving Television White Space and unlicensed spectrum. It will prove valuable for any country with a large hinterland where wired access is a challenge.

Place‐making at a national scale: Framing tar sands extraction as “Canadian” inThe Globe and Mail

Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro‐scale locales, recent explications of place‐making and place‐framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation‐state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation‐places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debates over the extraction of the Canadian tar sands as an illustrative example of how place is negotiated, deployed, and contested to legitimize particular outcomes. We analyzed 50 articles from one of Canada's most widely circulated daily newspapers, The Globe and Mail. We found diverging place‐frames of Canada used by government, industry, Indigenous groups, environmentalists, and other stakeholders as they make cases for and against the development of the tar sands. Framings of Canada promoted by the government and industry—Canada as a modern, rational, and legitimate actor—featured most prominently in the sample. Importantly, however, counter‐frames trouble narratives of Canada's inherent benevolent and responsible nature, and offer a small, yet strong opposition to hegemonic national imaginaries.

Strategic Bidding in a Combinatorial Clock Auction: The 700 Mhz Canadian Auction

Using data provided by Industry Canada this paper seeks to understand what strategic bidding is in the 2014 700-MHz Canadian auction. The auction format is known as Combinatorial Clock. Its design seeks to induce truthful bidding, that is, a bidder is expected to bid in a way that at each round of the Clock Rounds stage her utility is maximised, and expected to reveal her true valuation for each bundle that make up her final bid in the Combinatorial stage.The Combinatorial Clock auction is an innovative auction design which aims to overcome some of the problems evidenced in the application of the Simultaneous Ascending auction, a format that has been widely popular for assigning radio spectrum to commercial providers of mobile communications services over the last 20 years.The paper uses publicly available data from the auction by Industry Canada. By focusing on the longest of the three auction stages, the Clock Rounds, it examines the evolution of several auction indexes as a means to devise an approach to understand bidders’ strategic behaviour. It also uses a Revealed Preference theory framework to test whether bidders bidding was consistent with utility maximisation. When it is not, the paper analyses evidence to support claims of strategic behaviour.

Canada's 700 Mhz Spectrum Auction: A Case Study

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of Canada’s 700 MHz spectrum auction, which took place at the beginning of 2014. The auction format adopted by the Canadian regulator was the Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA). In Section 1, we review the band plan for Canada’s 700 MHz spectrum auction. We discuss the reasons and benefits from the band plan that Industry Canada applied. Section 2 presents the background information about selected, qualified bidders in this auction. Further in Section 3 the main stage of the auction, the Clock Rounds, is described; two conditions designed to induce bidders to truthfully reveal their preferences are explained as their understanding is key to understanding the novelties of the CCA; in this section results from the Canadian auction are presented. In Section 4 we analyse the Clock Rounds stage in search for behavioural patterns observed from the auction history and data that can help us characterise the bidding strategies employed in the auction.

The impact of internet file-sharing on the purchase of music CDs in Canada

This paper re-examines data from a survey commissioned by Industry Canada on the effects of internet peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing activities on music purchasing behaviour. The survey was designed to “inform Industry Canada's policy development work” (Quote from project Description from Industry Canada’s website at http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ic1.nsf/eng/01464.html downloaded 23 January 2012) and the need for copyright law reform in Canada in light of the technological innovation posed by P2P file sharing. The Journal of Evolutionary Economics published a study of the Industry Canada data by Andersen and Frenz (AF) in 2010 which claimed to show “… no association between the number of P2P files downloaded and CD album sales (Andersen and Frenz 2010 ibid p 374),” and “… that P2P file-sharing is not to blame for the decline in CD markets. Music markets are not simply undermined by free music downloading and P2P file-sharing (Ibid p375).” Our paper corrects a number of fundamental errors in this analysis of AF, in particular the fact AF biased their results by excluding from their analysis the group of consumers who had completely stopped purchasing CDs (potentially because of P2P activity) prior to 2005. This is the very group who were most responsive, or likely to have substituted P2P downloading for CD purchases. We use longitudinal analysis of how reported changes in P2P downloading by individuals related to their reported changes in CD demand between 2004 and 2005 to better test the hypothesis of whether P2P downloading may reduce CD demand. Contrary to AF’s results we find negative and generally statistically significant partial correlations between CD purchases and P2P downloads under a number of specifications and sample definitions. The range of these estimated correlations is between −0.047 and −0.061. This implies that a 10 % growth in P2P downloads is associated with between a 0.47 and 0.61 % decline in CD purchases. Our estimated relationships between CD sales and P2P downloads are broadly consistent with market sales data up to the time of the Industry Canada survey, unlike AF.

Evidence-based development of a strategy for Canadian apparel SMEs

Purpose – The Canadian apparel industry has long been challenged by imports from low-wage countries while its exports have declined since their height in 2002. This situation was exacerbated with trade liberalisation, which started in January 2005. Data from Industry Canada and a number of studies, amongst which those of the Apparel Human Resources Council (AHRC), showing the adverse effects of trade liberalisation since the phasing out of the multi-fibre agreement in 2005, the lack of competitive advantage for Canada as an apparel manufacturing nation and the subsequent rapid decline of its apparel industry, pointed to the need for a strategic response from the Canadian apparel industry, particularly from small to medium-sized enterprises. A study conducted for the AHRC of the Federal Government of Canada outlined a number of strategies that Canadian apparel companies could pursue, focusing on elements other than manufacturing in the traditional apparel value chain. These strategies seemed to suggest the implementation of a cluster approach where greater cooperation between suppliers would be required throughout the supply chain with a focus on functional expertise and relationships. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a cluster strategy is being applied or if indeed it is applicable to Canada’s apparel companies. Design/methodology/approach – A literature search, was undertaken to find the options available for the organisation of SMEs so that: an analytical framework could be created from the various theories and concepts that; would enable the evidence-based selection of an option or options suitable for adoption by Canadian apparel SMEs, to assist them to be more effective than stand-alone enterprises. Data were collected from case studies of Canadian apparel companies, an Experience Survey (conducted through face-to-face interviews with the directors of the AHRC, the Canadian Apparel Federation, Industry Canada, and Canadian retail and apparel supply executives) and from the responses to an online questionnaire sent to Canadian apparel suppliers. The data were subjected to examination using the analytical framework to determine whether the evidence existed on which to base a cluster-based strategic response to competition from overseas apparel suppliers, or whether one of the alternative options might be a more suitable match with the Canadian apparel business environment. Findings – Neither the case studies nor the Experience Survey revealed sufficient evidence of open communication or of cooperation among suppliers in areas that would fortify horizontal clustering amongst apparel SMEs, such as the sharing of labour, market research or supply chain management; similar findings emerged from the online questionnaire sent to Canadian apparel suppliers, which showed little evidence favouring cluster development as a strategic response for the Canadian apparel supply industry. The research also showed that industrialists, experts and government advisors all recognised that, beginning with trade liberalisation in 2005, there had been a transformation of the Canadian apparel industry from a manufacturing to a service industry with the retailers taking much stronger control of the supply chain than before, which, taken together with the lack of open communication or cooperation among apparel suppliers gives rise to conditions which favour collaboration over clustering. Originality/value – The paper provides a firm evidence base upon which to develop a different strategy for Canadian SMEs than the cluster approach that has been proposed to date. The findings reported in this paper show that Canadian apparel industry leaders, government and industry-led support organisations, retailers and suppliers all recognise that the type of open communication or of cooperation among suppliers in areas that would fortify horizontal clustering amongst apparel SMEs, such as the sharing of labour, market research or supply chain management does not occur to a sufficient extent to support the adoption of a cluster strategy by the Canadian apparel sector (although it may be applicable in Quebec). Canadian retailers have now taken the leading role in the supplier/retailer relationship. Any future strategy will need to take account of this repositioning of retailers and be centred upon vertical relationships between individual apparel suppliers and retailers.

Efficiency or Competition? A Structural Econometric Analysis of Canada's AWS Auction and the Set‐Aside Provision

In 2008, Industry Canada auctioned 105 MHz of spectrum to a group of bidders that included incumbents and potential new entrants into the Canadian mobile phone market, raising $4.25 billion. In an effort to promote new entry, 40 MHz of spectrum was set‐aside for new entrants. In order to estimate the implicit cost of the set‐aside provision, we estimate the parameters of the bidders' profit function via a maximum match estimator based on the notion of pairwise stability in matches. We find that all telecommunications firms valued both geographic complementarities across auction licenses as well as absolute spectrum. Under a reasonable alternative scenario, our results indicate that the set‐aside led to a total profit loss of approximately 10%.

An Interpretation of Bidding Strategies in Canada's 700 MHz Combinatorial Clock Auction

Industry Canada, the authority charged with radio spectrum allocation and assignment in Canada, administered a Combinatorial Clock Auction in 2013 whereby a sizable number of spectrum licenses were awarded to a handful of telecommunications operators to provide 4G cellular service throughout the Canadian provinces. The auction consisted of two main stages: the Allocation stage and the Assignment stage; in turn the allocation stage was further divided in two: the Clock Rounds and the Supplementary Round. The 700 MHz auction in 2014 was organised in 56 products which corresponded to 14 geographical areas with 4 sets of bands in each area (three bands with two blocks each, known as generic, and one band with a single paired block) and had all bidders bidding during the Clock rounds and in the Supplementary round. In the Assignment stage only those bidders who won generic licences in the Allocation stage got to bid on specific targeted licenses. This paper analyses the results from Canada’s 700 MHz auction in an attempt to unlock main aspects of bidders’ strategic bidding. It uses publicly available data posted by Industry Canada which follow every bidder’s demand history throughout the auction represented by the round-to-round demanded bundles and the aggregate amount bid on for each bundle.

Simplifying the Rule Book: A Proposal to Reform and Clarify Canada's Policy on Inward Foreign Direct Investment

Canada’s foreign direct investment (FDI) review regime, already criticized for its vague “net benefit” test for large proposed takeovers, has become potentially even more confusing to would-be investors in recent years. This Commentary proposes reforms to make the application of Canadian FDI rules more transparent, and give Canada a far better reputation as a place to invest. The author advocates an end to foreign investment economic review, leaving security to a separate committee, and closing some sectors completely or partially to foreign investment, as is now the case, but with these restrictions subject to periodic, mandatory reviews. Under the author’s proposal, Industry Canada would cease reviewing inward FDI for compliance with a “net benefit” test and would be only one participant in a committee reviewing FDI proposals for national security concerns. It would take central responsibility for monitoring federal sectoral ownership policies and would regularly review the effect of such policies, including an assessment of the ongoing need to keep in place foreign ownership limits on a sector, or to remove such limits. Clearly, there needs to be continuing analysis of sectoral limits as technology and government policies change over time. The rationale behind such an approach rests on the rejection of the widespread idea that securing controlling ownership of a Canadian-owned firm allows a foreign investor, whether or not an SOE, to operate at will in Canada. Nothing could be further from the truth. Regarding natural resource exploration and development alone, there are myriad laws and regulations for licences and other permissions on exploration, environmental review, sourcing of supplies and other inputs, as well as many other activities requiring approvals from various levels of government. Where improvements in such laws, regulations and policies are needed, they should be instituted and apply to both domestic and foreign firms with regard to their Canadian operations. It makes no sense to have rules that impose conditions on inward FDI but not on existing local firms.

Oil in the Ether: A Critical History of Spectrum Auctions in Canada

This article offers a critical history of the growth of the auctioning paradigm as a method of radio spectrum assignment in Canada. It establishes the growing importance of spectrum access as a primary conduit for computer-mediated communication worldwide, and it demonstrates how the rise of auctioning fundamentally challenges the administrative model that has been used for Canadian spectrum assignment for decades. The key junctures raised in the historical development of spectrum auctions include the pioneering theoretical debates of the 1950s, the fundamental changes to telecommunications in the 1980s, and Canada’s gradual acceptance of auctioning as an assignment mechanism in the 1990s. The research is based upon historical studies and scholarly publications as well as primary documents from the Department of Communications and Industry Canada.

Self-reported collision involvement associated with driving after alcohol use, cannabis use or both

Self-reported collision involvement associated with driving after alcohol use, cannabis use or both

Is There a There There - Toward Greater Certainty for Internet Jurisdiction

The unique challenge presented by the Internet is that compliance with local laws is rarely sufficient to assure a business that it has limited its exposure to legal risk. Since websites are accessible worldwide, the prospect that a website owner might be haled into a courtroom in a faroff jurisdiction is much more than a mere academic exercise, it is a very real possibility. The article identifies why the challenge of adequately accounting for the legal risk arising from Internet jurisdiction has been aggravated in recent years by the adoption of the Zippo legal framework, commonly referred to as the passive versus active test. The test provides parties with only limited guidance and often results in detrimental judicial decisions from a policy perspective. Given the inadequacies of the Zippo passive versus active test, it is now fitting to identify a more effective standard for determining when it is appropriate to assert jurisdiction in cases involving predominantly Internet-based contacts. With the benefit of the Zippo experience, the new test should remain technology neutral so as to: a) remain relevant despite ever-changing web technologies; b) create incentives that, at a minimum, do not discourage online interactivity; and c) provide sufficient certainty so that the legal risk of operating online can be effectively assessed in advance. The solution submitted in the article is to move toward a targetingbased analysis. Unlike the Zippo approach, a targeting analysis would © 2001 Michael Geist. t Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, and Director of ECommerce Law, Goodmans LLP. The author would like to thank the Uniform Law Conference of Canada and Industry Canada for their financial support in sponsoring this paper; Teresa David and William Karam for their research assistance; Vaso Maric, Rene Geist, Harvey Goldschmid, Ted Killheffer, Denis Rice, as well as the participants at the Consumer Measures Committee/Uniform Law Conference of Canada April 2001 Workshop on Consumer Protection and Jurisdiction in Electronic Commerce, the TPRC 2001 Conference, and the Georgetown University Advanced E-commerce Institute, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper; the editors of the BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL for their excellent work in bringing this paper to publication; and to Allison Geffen for her continued love and support. Any errors or omissions remain the sole responsibility of the author. 1346 BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 16:1345 seek to identify the intentions of the parties and to assess the steps taken to either enter or avoid a particular jurisdiction. Targeting would also lessen the reliance on an effects analysis, the source of considerable uncertainty since Internet-based activity can ordinarily be said to create some effects in most jurisdictions.

EM channel characteristics and their impact on MAC layer performance in underwater surveillance networks

AbstractWireless communications and multihop networking based on electromagnetic (EM) radios have been considered as an alternative to acoustic communications in seawater because in typical applications for networked underwater sensing, EM waves are much less susceptible to multipath distortion and environmental noise. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of EM channels in seawater and derive a novel EM signal propagation model. Based on the propagation model, we implement in the QualNet network simulator an EM underwater surveillance network for studying the impact of these unique characteristics of underwater EM channels on the media access control (MAC) layer performance. Both a single‐hop network model and a multihop network model are simulated. Simulation results show that the carrier sense multiple access without or with acknowledgement (CSMAWithoutACK or CSMAWithACK, respectively) has advantages over ALOHA and multiple access with collision avoidance in terms of packet average delay, packet delivery ratio, and MAC scheme overhead. In the multihop network model, the use of CSMAWithoutACK significantly reduces the packet average delay and the MAC scheme overhead, and both CSMAWithoutACK and CSMAWithACK achieve more than 90% packet delivery ratio. Therefore, CSMAWithoutACK (with no handshaking via request‐to‐send and clear‐to‐send control packets) is the most appropriate MAC protocol to be used in multihop EM‐based underwater surveillance networks. © Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada 2014. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Industry Canada

Industry Canada releases principles for electronic authentication

Simin H. Hodgett sets out the recently developed principles for authentication developed by the Canadian government

A Tale of Two Regulators: Telecom Policy Participation in Canada

AbstractWhat are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because new technologies are framed as individual rather than collective. Industry Canada is deemed opaque with an “advocacy deficit,” though the CRTC is more transparent and inviting. To succeed in both venues, academics need to work with advocacy organizations as “circumstantial activists.” Such academic participation can offer new conceptual frameworks, add nuance to discourse, substantiate the use of scholarly research in policy debates, and add to policy theory building.

A Tale of Two Regulators: Telecom Policy Participation in Canada

AbstractWhat are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because new technologies are framed as individual rather than collective. Industry Canada is deemed opaque with an “advocacy deficit,” though the CRTC is more transparent and inviting. To succeed in both venues, academics need to work with advocacy organizations as “circumstantial activists.” Such academic participation can offer new conceptual frameworks, add nuance to discourse, substantiate the use of scholarly research in policy debates, and add to policy theory building.