The SHAD program opened my mind to new ideas about the role of business in society.

That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to work on a project that involved renewing my connections with SHAD, through an internship this summer at the Canada West Foundation’s Centre for Human Capital Policy.

Today, the Canada West Foundation released Start ‘Em Up: Incubating nextgen innovators, the fruit of that effort. It was written by me and Janet Lane, Director of the Centre for Human Capital Policy. The paper describes how Canada can do more to create the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.

It is a topic I have come to know well.

SHAD is a month-long intensive program for high school students. The immersive experience exposes participants to entrepreneurship, innovation and science. I participated in the SHAD program at Memorial University in Newfoundland a few years ago. This year, SHAD and the Canada West Foundation came together to discuss how programs like SHAD – and entrepreneurship education in general – could help give more young people useful skills and tempt more of them into pursuing innovative or entrepreneurial careers.

My summer at the Foundation was the perfect opportunity to take my real life experience and apply it to public policy that can make a difference in the lives of other students and to educators.

Given that entrepreneurship education is still an emerging field, we wanted to hear what people had to say about their experiences with it. In focus groups with SHAD alumni this summer, we heard that participation was, for many, a catalyst for approaching problems in new ways and an eye-opener to what business and innovation are really all about. The same themes echoed in what many others we talked to had to say. Entrepreneurship education, far more than being simply a series of workshops in how to start a company, is and must be a way to help people find problems, devise solutions, and implement them in a business context.

Generally, this is happening.

Post-secondary institutions (and their donors) are putting major resources into new centres for entrepreneurship and innovation and designing programs that cut across traditional disciplinary lines to get the cross-pollination of ideas needed for innovation. Programs like SHAD and Junior Achievement provide exposure and experience for high school students, while new programs, like Ryerson University’s Base Camp program, continue to be created.

I have very much enjoyed my university education, which has included the opportunity to study in three different countries. But over the course of reading about all the incredible innovation and entrepreneurship programs sprouting at Canadian universities, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret for not having chosen to pursue one of them.

This, I believe, is the promise of entrepreneurship and innovation education.

Done right, such programs are fundamentally cross-disciplinary and challenging, with a model of education built around problem-solving and the combination of theory and practice. Students should want to take them! More than that, innovation and entrepreneurship should be something people aspire to, in the right circumstances; the continued growth of relevant programs is both a sign and a signal that innovation matters.

Our report aims to provide detail and direction on entrepreneurship education in Canada and its importance for a growing economy. For me, it has been a fantastic opportunity to delve into the ideas of innovation and education that I was first exposed to years ago, and I hope that anyone who reads this report will also be excited about the possibilities entrepreneurship education offers for Canadian students.

Liam St. Louis is a university student and was a Summer 2016 policy intern at the Canada West Foundation