UNC Chapel Hill is on an innovation kick these days.

It recently unveiled a new initiative, Innovate@Carolina, which hopes to find better ways to harness work done at the university.Submit N&O Blog | newsobserver.com blogs

And on Tuesday, UNC-CH enlisted an alum, Heather Monroe-Blum, to talk about innovation. Hers was the featured speech at University Day, UNC-CH's annual birthday party.

Monroe-Blum, who has a doctorate in epidemiology from UNC-CH, is the principal - essentially, the chancellor - of McGill University, a prestigious institution in Canada.

She has specialized in innovation at McGill and spoke Tuesday about how innovation stems from unique viewpoints. Go against the grain, she urged. When smart people from disparate backgrounds work together, discovery happens.

She writes:

Connections across sectors – universities, governments, industry and communities – are critical, and so are links across disciplines. We face complex problems – unemployment, obesity and starvation, the challenge of achieving higher participation in education for all Americans, including a focussed effort to get boys through high school and university, and, complex, highly transmittable diseases.

No one discipline holds the key. And as any artist, writer, designer or scientist will tell you, the surest way to get the creative juices flowing is to experience something different, to look at a problem from a new perspective. And that’s precisely what multidisciplinary research and learning allow us to do: to connect in order to be creative.

Read her entire address here.

Joe Ferrell just can't help himself.

He can't let you sit in the audience at some stuffy university event while he drones on and on about some wonderful person's wonderful background.

 "I've sat through too many of these things and been bored to death; Ferrell said recently. "It's like reading the obituaries."

That's why, as the secretary of the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, Ferrell tries to lighten the mood at commencement, when honorary degrees are bestowed upon notable folks with long resumes, and at University Day, when distinguished alumni awards are given to, um, notable folks with long resumes.

He does so by prefacing the rote biographies of these overachievers with short, pithy, well-thought-out comments that warm up the crowd.

Take his recent University Day introduction of Janie McLawhorn Fouke, a distinguished alumni award winner who has served on an array of advisory boards and professional organizations and is among the world's leaders in biomedical engineering.

"Don't ask Janie Fouke about a glass ceiling for women in engineering," Ferrell intoned in introducing her. "She's standing on the shards."

Today is University Day at UNC Chapel Hill, and Chancellor Holden Thorp has put a twist on the traditional State of the University address that campus leaders here customarily give as part of the day's celebration.

This year, Thorp gave a virtual address. You can click on the 9-minute youtube video below or click here to read the transcript.

The chancellor doesn't break any news in this year's address. Mostly, it's a summary of all that went on in the past year. It emphasizes the budget crisis that sapped $67 million from university coffers, and the Bain report, created by a consultant to help the university streamline its administrative and financial operations.

And it also trumpets some highlights from the past year, like the national championship in basketball, the success of Anoop Desai on American Idol, and the fact that the university produced two Rhodes Scholars.

Not bad.

On the budget issue: Thorp mentions that the economic crisis has led more students to request financial aid in order to get to or stay in college. The university has managed to patch aid packages together for all who needed them; the Carolina Covenant program, which offers full aid funding for students who demonstrate great financial need, has swelled and now accounts for 11 percent of the first-year class.

At 11 this morning, Gov. Beverly Perdue will give the keynote University Day address at Memorial Hall.