"Crowded elevators smell different to midgets."
That bit of irreverent juvenile humour typifies what happens when you take a group of smart, enthusiastic teenagers to the 33rd floor of Calgary's sleek TransCanada tower to visit the network operation centre of Alberta's SuperNet.
I recently had the privilege of leading groups of Shad Valley students through the corridors and labs of Canadian business, and it gave me a rare glimpse into how the consumers and businesspeople of the future think.
"Shads," as they call themselves, are Grade 11 and 12 students from across Canada who are selected for a month-long, live-in experience that focuses on science, engineering, technology and entrepreneurship. The University of Calgary hosted 60 Shads this July. Unlike other schools and camps, the Shad Valley program has no set curriculum. The program's goal is to provide real-life challenges, and show them interesting and exciting companies and people.
Almost no business leaders say no when you offer to bring them a group of bright teenagers who really want to know about their work.
"Talking to them is just like talking to adults" says Jeff Adams, public relations manager for CSI Wireless.
"I was extremely impressed by the sophistication of their questions; they're not the kind of questions you get from a normal high school audience."
Adams cited a discussion with one Shad student about the pros and cons of branding his company's desktop cellphones with the nameplate of telecom giant Motorola.
He said the point raised by Brent Laurence of Caledon Village, Ont., was a topic "that occupied a considerable amount of discussion time among our company's senior management."
Another visit took some Shads into the funky downtown house-turned-office of Blister Entertainment, Inc.
The company makes location-based games that rely on the GPS function embedded in many cellphones. Marketing vice-president Stephen Nykolyn welcomed the opportunity to show off as-yet-unreleased games, and to pick the brains of young cellphone users - who are exactly his target demographic.
At one point, Shad student Amit Virmani, whose family owns a cellphone outlet in Fredericton, N.B., asked a particularly good technical question.
"Are you looking for a job?" Nykolyn joked.
"Well, in a couple of years I'll be looking for a co-op work term," replied the 16-year-old Virmani, passing over one of his business cards.
Perhaps the strangest visit was to the Defence R&D Canada Counter Terrorism Technology Centre at Suffield, near Medicine Hat. There, a group of students marvelled at the specialized equipment used to detect and fight against chemical and biological weapons.
The highlight was a visit to the biocontainment facility where the staff had helpfully prepared cultures of nasty bacteria. Biologists there even showed wide-eyed Shads a bottle of (killed) anthrax, sparking a number of queries about careers in this field of science.
By pure luck, the national conference of the Canadian Institute of Planners was in Calgary this year during Shad Valley. U of C environmental design professor Richard Levy and I were scheduled to do a session on using technology to help planners communicate with the public.
We decided to bring a group of Shad students along, since they are, after all, the "taxpayers of the future."
This turned into a lively discussion where the students were all in favour of using technology to widely dispense planning information, building designs and so on. Some of the planners expressed reluctance to "share too much information" and many were worried about the how the political side of planning would change if the public had more extensive access to information.
Since the students live, eat, work, play and attend lectures on the University of Calgary campus, it's natural to call upon some of that institution's premier facilities and people.
As well as a number of top-notch seminars at the faculty of medicine, Shads were able to visit two virtual reality "caves" and the famous Human Performance Lab.
There, they were able to study motion with high-speed video cameras.
Other on-campus highlights included a talk by recently arrived professor Stuart Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics. He's the author of several books, including At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization.
Kauffman is a Renaissance'-like combination of biologist, medical doctor, computer scientist and philosopher.
His Shad Valley talk tied together aspects of DNA transcription, turing machines and stem cells. These topics would fly over the heads of most high school students, but the Shads lapped it up and asked for more.
"What happens too often in high school is that we're sort of shoved into courses," says Alia Sunderji of Toronto.
"There's really not much wiggle room to find out what we're passionate about."
Shad Valley is all about wiggle room, and about testing your limits. In addition to academic and physical challenges, students are asked to devise a totally new product or service along a given theme.
This year it was "health and wellness," and projects included everything from a detector for date-rape drugs to a new kind of electric plug and a posture-improving backpack.
The 60 students who just completed Shad Valley Calgary, as well as those in the other Shad programs across Canada, are probably still resting up from their gruelling schedule.
But, at least for once in their young lives, they found out how much they can accomplish when they crowd together in a kind of intellectual elevator.
Far from being midgets, they gave me the impression that I was in the company of giants.
Student applications for Shad Valley are available in the fall on www.shad.ca.
Companies interested in being involved in the 2006 program can contact me at the e-mail address below.
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
