Summary Tony Wagner UERRE

Creating Innovators

by Tony Wagner

Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner

2

Summary.

The seven survival Skills all student need for learning and having a citizenship in an increasingly flat world are: 1. Critical thinking and problem solving.

2. Collaboration across networks and learning by influence.

3. Agility and adaptability.

4. Initiative and entrepreneurship.

Some of the most essential qualities of a successful innovator appear to be the following:

路 Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questionsand a desire to understand more deeply. 路 Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that are very different from your own.

5. Accesing and analyzing information.

路 Associative or integrative thinking.

6. Effective oral and written communication.

路 A bias toward action and experimentation.

7. Curiosity and imagination.

U-ERRE

3

Teresa Amabile in her most influential article, "How to Kill Creativity", shows that the capacity for creativity is the result of an interrelationship among three things: expertise, creative-thinking skills and motivation and this is equally useful for understanding the essential elements of innovation. In the center of this diagram we can substitute the word innovation for creativity.

Expertise is, in a word, knowledge technical, procedural, and intellectual.

Creativity (innovation)

Motivation

Creative thinking skills determine how flexibly and imaginatively people approach their problems. Do their solutions upend the status quo? Do they persevere through dry spells?

4

The research of Tony Wagner, his work as an educator and experience as a parent suggest that there are three interrelated elements to intrinsic motivation: play, passion and purpose.

Teaching an Innovator.

The goal is to empower the student, they must feel like they´ve taken command of a body of material and can do things with it. The real learning goes on when they get into the lab, where they have to apply what they have been hearing and reading about it and integrate all of these pieces together.

Motivating an Innovator.

An essential element in the development of the capacity to innovate is focusing on learning as discovery through trial and error, the interest in the children´s process of learning and the unusual combination of both structure and freedom that they allowed their children, this is an essential element in the development of capacity to innovate.

The process focus on nurturing self-confidence and intrinsic motivation to learn and to explore with unquestioning support of the student´s decisions.

Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner

Creating a Culture of Innovation.

Teamwork, Interdisciplinary problem solving, intrinsic drives and a kind of empowerment that gives individuals the confidence they need to take a risks. The classes that best prepare students for work in innovative companies would create a culture that most closely resembles what they will encounter in the workplace.

U-ERRE

, interdiscipli

na

ry

pr o

g, intrinsic

n, play, and atio em lo r p

ow

To scale up innovations in science, technology, engineering and math and to develop the skills of entrepreneurship, we need many more teachers with different approaches. To maintain our standard of living and improve our world, every young person needs to become an innovator.

Social Innovators.

David Bornstein describes social innovators as “people with new ideas to address major problems who are relentless in the pursuit of their vision,

p ex

STEM. Science, Technology, Engineering y Mathematics

s:

e

rm

Motivation

i nc e n tiv e

t en

Innovation

STEM Innovators.

lv in

Creative thinking skills

Expertise

- so

CU

em

LT U

rk wo m ea :t

bl

RE

5

people who simply will not take no for an answer, who will not give up until they have spread their ideas as far as they possibly can�.

Armed with new sources of information , young people grow up acutely conscious of environmental destruction, poverty, injustice and so on. Those same communication technologies also armed people with powerful new tools for organizing and coordinating efforts.

With their science and math background, STEM innovators are usually seen as differently motivated from social innovators, who frequently come from a liberal arts background.

The goal is to empower people and give them the tools they need to make the change. Play, Passion and Purpose

6

have been equally important as motivators.

Passion and purpose are even more essential for young people from disadvantage backgrounds who struggle against poverty and prejudice.

For this group, having a strong sense of passion and purpose is what enables them to have the courage, discipline and tenacity to transcend their circumstances and surroundings and to have hope and direction for their future.

Some young innovators have done well in school, while others have not. But even those who were most successful in school derived the greatest benefit from only one or two teachers – and all of those teachers defied the conventions of their school or college in one way or another.

Innovating Learning.

Knowledge is also essential in order to innovate.

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. Another equally serious

Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner

problem with the traditional model is the exponential growth of information.

One cannot possibly cover all of the academic content in a given area.

The essential point is that education for innovation must be constructed consciously and needs to cultivate the capabilities for collaboration, multidisciplinary inquiry, trial and error, and the creations of new ideas, products and services. It must also incorporate the intrinsic motivations of play, passion and purpose in learning.

For students to become innovators in the twenty-first century, they need a different education, not merely more education.

U-ERRE

7

that comes with a position or title. It is the authority that comes for having some expertise, but it also comes from the ability to listen well and empathetically, to ask good questions, to model good values, to help an individual more fully realize his or her talents – and to create shared vision and accountability for its realization. It is the authority that empowers teams to discover better solutions to new problems.

Epilogue.

The Future of Innovation.

Transforming the classroom experience at every level is essential to develop the capacities of young people to became innovators.

As a teacher, parent, executive or ranking officer in the military, you are assumed to be “in charge� and to have all the answers, your authority comes with your position or title or rank and is generally not questioned. The problem is that the highly disruptive nature of innovation creates new challenges to traditional authority and successful leadership of an innovative enterprise requires a different kind of authority.

Authority still matters for successful innovation, but it is not the authority

You must understand how important it is that you remain true to your vision and that you persevere in the pursuit of your particular passion.

Being an innovator and an entrepreneur is a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is that you have the capacity to see and do things that others around you may not. The curse is that to realize your potential and the potential of your creations, you have to work a lot of different things. But you can and you must persevere. Your personal sense of satisfaction and the future of your country and our planet all hang in the balance.

Wagner, T. 2012.

"Creating Innovators".

Scribner.