Dealmaking and Innovation

Congratulations to the Winners of the Canadian Dealmakers Awards. These Winners know much about innovation.
Dealmaking and Innovation

Our March 2016 issue recognizes the Winners of the Canadian Dealmakers Awards, namely the executives from those companies who successfully completed M&A transactions in 2015. Congratulations to all of them. These Winners know much about innovation.

Ben Hirschler wrote, in a recent Reuters report: “As the world enters an era of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing,” nearly half of the executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum “expect an artificial intelligence machine to be sitting on a corporate board of directors within the next decade. Welcome to the next industrial revolution. After steam, mass production and information technology, the so-called ‘fourth industrial revolution’ will bring ever faster cycles of innovation, posing huge challenges to companies, workers, governments and societies alike.”

How about their lawyers? How can they keep up with the demand for innovation?

In order to keep pace or even get ahead of their clients’ pace of change, lawyers might consider the innovations going on in other sectors. The Tobacco-Free Initiative at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is a case in point.

Through this Initiative, smoking among in-patients has been significantly reduced despite the odds. This success owes in part to the fact that “clients within the forensic rehabilitation program have been provided with the opportunity to receive immediate feedback on the levels of carbon monoxide in their blood… Clients are able to earn prizes by producing lower carbon monoxide levels than during baseline readings. If clients produce breath samples over their baseline carbon monoxide level, they are provided with health teaching on the negative impacts of smoking. This provides not only an opportunity for learning, but also an opportunity to celebrate success in an area that traditionally focuses on failures and consequences for rule infractions.”

Just because technology is ever intensifying, and robots are on the way, does not change the fact that innovation geared toward the positive rather than negative can be very effective. It may even lead to an Award.