Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The WorldCatalogue copy from the publisher (Scribner/Simon & Schuster):
From a prominent educator, author, and founder of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group comes a provocative look at why innovation is today’s most essential real-world skill and what young people need from parents, teachers, and employers to become the innovators of America’s future.
I N  T H I S  G R OU N D B R E A K I N G  B O O K ,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 then looks more widely at the education system and 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 collabora- tion, 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 to creating the change makers of tomorrow.