WELCOME to the Brain Exchange

"Working together is better than working behind our moats."
- Brain Exchange participant

President's Message

In 2003/04, we launched the U of C Brain Exchange for community and academic leaders to share ideas. The point was to pool Calgary's intellectual capital in a series of forums tackling topics of the day.

Participants challenged one another to examine preconceived notions and tightly-held paradigms

It proved to be a lively chemistry of informative, illuminating and often provocative discussion. We encouraged participants to pull no punches in their free and frank exchange of opinions.

In the first year we tackled four topics: Ethics in Business; Corporate Social Responsibility; Politics Just Got Interesting (Politics Unplugged); The University of Calgary and the Calgary Stampede - Married or Are We Just Living Together?

We listened to the many ideas generated around the table and realized that some of our intellectual batteries needed a little re-charging.

For instance, we have taken our deeper understanding of corporate social responsibility into our strategic thinking around the importance of return to community.

We have turned knowledge into action and intend to sponsor a larger forum on Corporate Social Responsibility in 2005. We will also sponsor a forum on Super Cities. Once again, participants will include political, business, community and university leaders.

We also learned that the community expects our university to lead discussion on political, social and economic issues of the day. But people want those debates to include participants from all sectors of the community.

The community expects us to lead with the big ideas and to challenge our imaginations. Calgarians want us to break down the imponderables and create possibilities.

The Brain Exchange has quickly become a forum that allows the university to draw ideas and energy from the community, and then synthesize and propose them for the good of all.

The community believes that we must do this together. So, what haven't we thought of? Do you have suggestions about topics that we should be discussing? Together we can turn ideas into action as we develop the bold initiatives that will carry our dynamic university and city forward.

- Harvey Weingarten, President and Vice-Chancellor,
University of Calgary