Does America Need More Innovators?

"This volume brings together policymakers, design executives, historians, ethnographers, social critics, and educators to have a conversation about this imperative, its history, its present, and its future. Contributions ask themselves and one another: Why did programs for making innovators emerge? How have they evolved? What is their track record? What are their collective assumptions and shortcomings? How might they be improved? And, what does the future hold for them? While numerous prior works have investigated innovation, this volume emphasizes innovators and how they are made. The focus on innovators is especially valuable because it is through the initiatives documented in this volume that the motivations, values, and best practices of innovation are crafted, adopted, and spread. The volume is organized into three sections according to the contributors' practices and commitments. To establish a common understanding of what drives their different perspectives on innovation, each section begins with a brief essay that introduces and analyzes the shared assumptions, strengths, and limitations of that section's contributors. Section I, Champions, is a tour of innovator training today. Section II, Critics, offers a primer on critical innovation studies. Section II, Reformers, is an introduction to initiatives that seek to reshape what it means to be an innovator, from programs for supporting children's self-directed discovery to organizations that target discrimination in high technology industries. The volume concludes with a call for reconsidering America's demand for more innovators. The US may be well aware of what is necessary to innovate, but this volume asks why, for what, and by whom, and demonstrates that the answers are neither simple nor uniform"--