Tony Reinhart has a piece in today’s Globe how in terms of innovation and achievement Toronto could learn from Waterloo. He interviews Roger Martin and Thomas Homer-Dixon.

“Waterloo has two claims to fame, and they’re just hard to argue with,” said Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “One is that Microsoft hires more engineers from the University of Waterloo than any other university, and then RIM,” he said, referring to Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry the popular American President cannot live without.
[...]
UW, a smaller institution on a smaller campus in a smaller city, has only a handful of faculties with “less entrenched and immutable cultures,” whose leaders can collaborate more naturally. Those leaders “believe in a common vision for the institution as a pragmatic, problem-focused innovation generator,” said Dr. Homer-Dixon.
— Lessons for Toronto: What the Big Smoke could learn from Waterloo The Globe and Mail 3 Jul 2009

“Pretty funny to hear how people outside of UW admire how it works… I tend to agree on most things but we could do better,” jrodg commented back to me when I tweeted it.

I think Waterloo the city and the university are great, but I think both groups of people and institutions lack introspection, are too proud, and don’t face failings well enough. There are things to improve but people don’t acknowledge it.

I also like the article, but it is Gladwellian in its lack of depth. I’d like to learn more from the comparisons with U of T and Toronto.