Does America Need More Innovators

Download or read book Does America Need More Innovators? written by Matthew Wisnioski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate, by champions, critics, and reformers of innovation. Corporate executives, politicians, and school board leaders agree—Americans must innovate. Innovation experts fuel this demand with books and services that instruct aspiring innovators in best practices, personal habits, and workplace cultures for fostering innovation. But critics have begun to question the unceasing promotion of innovation, pointing out its gadget-centric shallowness, the lack of diversity among innovators, and the unequal distribution of innovation's burdens and rewards. Meanwhile, reformers work to make the training of innovators more inclusive and the outcomes of innovation more responsible. This book offers an overdue critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate by bringing together innovation's champions, critics, and reformers in conversation. The book presents an overview of innovator training, exploring the history, motivations, and philosophies of programs in private industry, universities, and government; offers a primer on critical innovation studies, with essays that historicize, contextualize, and problematize the drive to create innovators; and considers initiatives that seek to reform and reshape what it means to be an innovator. Contributors Errol Arkilic, Catherine Ashcraft, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, W. Bernard Carlson, Lisa D. Cook, Humera Fasihuddin, Maryann Feldman, Erik Fisher, Benoît Godin, Jenn Gustetic, David Guston, Eric S. Hintz, Marie Stettler Kleine, Dutch MacDonald, Mickey McManus, Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Natalie Rusk, Andrew L. Russell, Lucinda M. Sanders, Brenda Trinidad, Lee Vinsel, Matthew Wisnioski

Download or read book They Made America written by David Lefer and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 922 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated history of American innovators -- some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating -- by the author of the bestselling The American Century.

Download or read book Creating Innovators (Enhanced eBook) written by Tony Wagner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. In profiling compelling young American innovators such as Kirk Phelps, product manager for Apple’s first iPhone, and Jodie Wu, who founded a company that builds bicycle-powered maize shellers in Tanzania, Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern—a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: These are the forces that drive young innovators. Wagner shows how we can apply this knowledge as educators and what parents can do to compensate for poor schooling. He takes readers into the most forward-thinking schools, colleges, and workplaces in the country, where teachers and employers are developing cultures of innovation based on collaboration, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation. The result is a timely, provocative, and inspiring manifesto that will change how we look at our schools and workplaces, and provide us with a road map for creating the change makers of tomorrow. Creating Innovators will feature its own innovative elements: more than sixty original videos that expand on key ideas in the book through interviews with young innovators, teachers, writers, CEOs, and entrepreneurs, including Thomas Friedman, Dean Kamen, and Annmarie Neal. Produced by filmmaker Robert A. Compton, the videos are embedded directly into this eBook file and may also be accessed by visiting www.creatinginnovators.com.

Download or read book American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D written by Eric S. Hintz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D labs as an important source of inventions. During the nineteenth century, heroic individual inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries while achieving widespread fame. However, by 1927, a New York Times editorial suggested that teams of corporate scientists at General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont had replaced the solitary "garret inventor" as the wellspring of invention. But these inventors never disappeared. In this book, Eric Hintz argues that lesser-known inventors such as Chester Carlson (Xerox photocopier), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Earl Tupper (Tupperware) continued to develop important technologies throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Hintz explains how independent inventors gradually fell from public view as corporate brands increasingly became associated with high-tech innovation. Focusing on the years from 1890 to 1950, Hintz documents how American independent inventors competed (and sometimes partnered) with their corporate rivals, adopted a variety of flexible commercialization strategies, established a series of short-lived professional groups, lobbied for fairer patent laws, and mobilized for two world wars. After 1950, the experiences of independent inventors generally mirrored the patterns of their predecessors, and they continued to be overshadowed during corporate R&D's postwar golden age. The independents enjoyed a resurgence, however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Apple's Steve Jobs and Shark Tank's Lori Greiner heralded a new generation of heroic inventor-entrepreneurs. By recovering the stories of a group once considered extinct, Hintz shows that independent inventors have long been—and remain—an important source of new technologies.

Download or read book Innovation for Value and Mission written by Peet van Biljon and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovation. No other concept is so widely celebrated, yet so secretly dreaded. The reason: innovation requires managing through uncertainty. This is hard for any organization whether private or public, small or large. This book provides a roadmap for those who want to understand and manage innovation in all its aspects. It explains both the "how" and the "why" of innovation – its economic and policy context as well as the techniques by which it can be orchestrated, along with the management systems needed to govern it. Innovation is uniquely presented through both a private-sector (value-creating) and public-sector (mission-fulfilling) lens. Topics covered in context include modern innovation and creativity techniques such as design thinking and the Lean Startup, the organizational challenges of innovation, as well as innovation project- and portfolio management techniques. Business-model innovation and open innovation complete the picture from the manager’s perspective. The private and public financing of R&D, startups, and corporate innovation are presented – contrasting the private and public worlds while explaining how they complement each other. Government innovation policy is discussed in its historical and contemporary context, and the innovation policy toolset is introduced. Continual innovation is vital for companies and countries to prosper. Readers will learn why innovation must follow technological breakthroughs to raise productivity and economic growth, and how innovation – when done right – can benefit larger society. An explanation for unequal growth – that some companies, regions, and countries are not seeing the full productivity gains promised by modern technology – is explored in the context of technology diffusion. No previous experience in innovation management, economics or public policy is assumed, and the book moves fast to equip the reader with practical tools and techniques. Innovation for Value and Mission is suitable for an introductory graduate level course, or as a desk reference for experienced practitioners and policymakers. Because it connects multiple topic areas and contains ample additional references, the book is also a great resource for those with expertise in one particular area of innovation who desire to branch out into other areas.

Download or read book The Innovator's Cookbook written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, Emergence, Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open and Ghost Map, and an acknowledged bestselling leader on the subject of innovation, gathers - for a foundational text on the subject of innovation - essays, interviews, and cutting-edge insights by such exciting field leaders as Peter Drucker, Richard Florida, Eric Von Hippel, Dean Keith Simonton, Arthur Koestler, John Seely Brown, and Marshall Berman. Johnson also provides new material from Marisa Mayer of Google, Twitter's Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's former Chief Software Architect. With additional commentary by Johnson himself, this book reveals the innovation found in a wide range of fields, including science, technology, energy, transportation, education, art, and sociology, making it vital, fresh, and fascinating reading for our time, and for the future.

Download or read book The Innovator's Way written by Peter J. Denning and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two experts show that innovation is a skill that can be learned and describe eight essential practices for achieving success. Innovation is the ruling buzzword in business today. Technology companies invest billions in developing new gadgets; business leaders see innovation as the key to a competitive edge; policymakers craft regulations to foster a climate of innovation. And yet businesses report a success rate of only four percent for innovation initiatives. Can we significantly increase our odds of success? In The Innovator's Way, innovation experts Peter Denning and Robert Dunham reply with an emphatic yes. Innovation, they write, is not simply an invention, a policy, or a process to be managed. It is a personal skill that can be learned, developed through practice, and extended into organizations. Denning and Dunham identify and describe eight personal practices that all successful innovators perform: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading, and embodying. Together, these practices can boost a fledgling innovator to success. Weakness in any of these practices, they show, blocks innovation. Denning and Dunham chart the path to innovation mastery, from individual practices to teams and social networks.