It’s All About Innovation These Days

Written by John Nnamchi,
Canadian student at McGill University, graduating class of 2017

The quest towards fostering innovation and implementing technological solutions has endeared an ever-growing number of institutions of higher education across the globe, including McGill University. The trend has led to efforts ranging from university start-up competitions, to awards supporting innovative projects, to collaborative think tanks. At McGill however, most of these efforts have been conceived and deployed by members of university faculty. The resulting generation gap hinders them in understanding the true needs of McGill’s student body. Furthermore due to administrative reasons and convenience, universities still adopt a top-down approach when it comes to identifying and integrating potentially innovative solutions for the student body. This leads to a slow implementation process, possible outdated solutions, and poor student adoption rates.

“The amount of useless and out of date applications for McGill students is substantial” a McGill student quotes. Thus, while this means the conception and development of innovative solutions should stem from the student body, such ad-hoc initiatives do not possess the administrative, financial, and technological resources that current top-down organizations possess. It is the reason why countless useful and innovative solutions attempted by student initiated project groups fail.