Book Review: Creating Innovators

“Being the ‘sage on the stage’ is problematic when you are trying to encourage intrinsic motivation and encourages students to have ownership of their learning.” tony Wagner, Creating Innovators

Are you ready for your thinking about education to be disrupted?  Check out Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner.  There aren’t a ton of new things in this book, but I am really in debt to Tony for putting all of this in the same place to share as a resource for those that I have the privilege to work with on a daily basis.  The strength of this book is in the real-life stories and examples that Tony was able to share to prove that kids really do want to learn…they just don’t all learn the same way!

Here are several things that I highlighted while reading…consider yourself aware…

• What are the capacities that matter most for innovation, and how are they best taught?
• What we urgently need is a new engine of economic growth for the twenty-first century.  The solution to our economic and social challenges is the same: creating a viable and sustainable economy that creates good jobs without polluting the planet.  And there is general agreement as to what that new economy must be based on.  One word: innovation.
• So if we are to remain globally competitive in today’s world, we need to produce more than just a few entrepreneurs and innovators.  We need to develop the creative and enterprising capacities of all of our students.
• “Innovation may then be defined as the process of having original ideas and insights that have value, and then implementing them so that they are accepted and used by significant numbers of people.  By this definition, a major innovation is one that is so successful that soon after its introduction few people can even remember what life was like before the innovation was introduced.” Rick Miller, president of Olin College of Engineering
• “There isn’t anyone that doesn’t need to be a creative problem solver.” Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy
• There are essentially two very different kinds of innovation in both the for-profit and nonprofit arenas: incremental and disruptive.  Incremental innovation is about significantly improving existing products, processes, or services.  Disruptive or transformative innovation, on the other hand, is about creating a new or fundamentally different product or service that disrupts existing markets and displaces formerly dominant technologies.
• “Design Thinkers”: empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism, and collaborators.  Tim Brown, Harvard Business Review
• People who are successful at Google also have a bias towards action–you see something broken and you fix it.  You are smart enough to spot problems, but you don’t whine about them or wait for somebody else to fix them.  You ask, ‘How can I make things better?’
• Sir Ken Robinson’s recent book, The Element, and his TED talks describe many of the ways curiosity and creativity are discouraged–“educated out of us”, he often says.
• So what would it mean if we were to intentionally develop the entrepreneurial and innovative talents of all young people–to nurture their initiative, curiosity, imagination, creativity, and collaborative skills, as well as their analytical abilities–along with essential qualities of character such as persistence, empathy, and a strong moral foundation?
• A child is not going to give you quality time unless you have already put in the quantity.
• “Being a PhD never appealed to me.  I never wanted to spend five years becoming really deep in one area.  I wanted to find ways to add value at the margin.” Kirk Phelps, part of the original iPhone team at Apple
• “Having an element of whimsy in the project is really highly motivational.”  Ed Carryer, Smart Product Design Lab at Stanford
• “My focus is on teaching and making sure the course sequence stays both fresh and just back from the bleeding edge of technology.  I want them to feel that the stuff they are learning is current.” Ed Carryer, Smart Product Design Lab at Stanford
• “You want to keep your learning rate high.  I want to keep adding tools to my toolbox, thought I don’t quite know what I want to do with them yet.” Kirk Phelps
• How important is college in the development of young people’s capacities to be innovative?
• “There are some companies that are continuously disruptive–Apple is run like a start-up.  It is a company that is continuously innovating, through rapid prototyping and iterating.  Rethinking what the future will be.  Yes, you have to make a profit to build a successful company, but real success means putting that profit back into continuous innovation.”  Shanna Tellerman, Sims Ops Studios
• Play, passion, and purpose
• “I try to take students as they come, show them that they are the authority by helping them create a query and explore an opportunity.  More and more students are saying that education which is merely content delivery doesn’t work, doesn’t stick.  For students, it’s about applying what they know, in order to connect the dots.” Paul Bottino, mentor at Harvard
• Students don’t have to be blocked from dreaming by the fact that they haven’t learned what they need to know to realize that dream.  On the contrary, innovators are most interested in dreams that take them where they don’t have learning.
• All of the young innovators whom I interviewed while researching this book described a teacher or mentor who had made a significant difference in their lives.  And when I then interviewed these teachers and mentors, I discovered that each of them is an outlier–an innovator–in his or her university, school, or work setting.  Every one of them teachers and mentors in ways that are very similar to one another, but different from their peers.
• I see a lot of students who have a real fear of failure, which really limits them from even trying something.
• For many middle-class young people growing up in a postindustrial society, discovering what they are passionate about gives their life deeper meaning, and having a sense of purpose drives them to work harder than they might otherwise and leads them to create important innovations.
• We see a pattern that’s now familiar in the development of a young innovator: parents who encourage their children to find and pursue their passions and an outlier teacher who empowers his or her students to explore and discover in the classroom and does the same as a mentor outside of school.
• One problem with the traditional approach to learning is that the way in which academic content is taught is often stultifying: It is too often merely a process of transferring information through rote memorization, with few opportunities for students to ask questions or discover things on their own–the essential practices of innovation.
• Race to the Top is a race to mediocrity.
• Being the ‘sage on the stage’ is problematic when you are trying to encourage intrinsic motivation and encourages students to have ownership of their learning.
• The culture of schooling in America celebrates and rewards individual achievement, while offering few meaningful opportunities for genuine collaboration.  Students are ranked and sorted according to their levels of achievement, as measured by tests and grades.  Even in so-called group work, which can occasionally be found in some high school classes, one or two students often do most of the work, while the rest of the group sit passively.  Serious and sustained collaboration is not a real expectation, either for students or faculty.
• The most innovative companies celebrate failure.
• Learning research shows that students understand and retain much more of what they learn when they have studied and used the knowledge in an applied context.
• At the introduction of the iPad 2, Steve Jobs said, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough–it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true that in these post-PC devices.”
• For students to become innovators in the twenty-first century, they need a different education, not merely more education.
• We have to suspend judgements about how things are supposed to be if we’re going to develop the capacities of children to be innovators as adults.
• A child has to get bored before he can figure out how to get himself out of boredom.
• We want children to learn to observe what a particular conflict is about an think about other solutions and try different ones until they find what works best.
• So many kids are so programmed to succeed that they have no chance to explore things.
• I believe that if you are going to develop your children’s entrepreneurship skills, then you have to allow them opportunities to take initiative, and that invariably means some risk.
• To be the parent of a young innovator and an entrepreneur today requires confidence and courage.
• Imagine how different our schools and colleges could be if they all simply made the same three changes that the army is implementing: “Convert most classroom experiences into collaborative problem-solving events led by facilitators; tailor learning to the individual learner’s experience and competence level; dramatically reduce or eliminate instructor-led slide presentation lectures.”
• The questions are, can those of us who have positional authority develop this different kind of earned and enabling authority?  Can our institutions of learning and work recognize and promote a new kind of authority?  Can we move from top-down, compliance-based systems of accountability in our schools and companies to forms of accountability that are more face-to-face–reciprocal and relational?  And, finally, are we prepared to not merely tolerate but to welcome and celebrate the kinds of questioning, disruption, and even disobedience that come with innovation?

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”