Purposely Teaching Innovation and Creativity

As the US economy shifts from an industrial production base to one based on information technology and intellectual property, the importance of innovation in science, math and technology increases apace. Now, more than ever before, the economic wellbeing of the United States depends on how well our nation can invent creative new technologies and novel and original solutions to world-shaking challenges while observing ever more difficult constraints on energy and resource utilization.

The old imperatives to invent efficient manufacturing infrastructure and train people to man them is no longer the focus of our future economy. And yet almost all of our nation's technical educational systems from Kindergarten through graduate schools are still built around the "traditional" model designed to support the industrialization of America. In that sense, our current school system was designed to train a population to efficiently perform regular and repetitive tasks that required well-known skills. It's not much of a stretch to realize that such a system designed to replicate specific skills and inculcate known approaches to well-understood problems is not well-suited to foster creativity.

Unfortunately, the world's technology landscape has changed so rapidly over the last decades that today's largest prospective economic engines surrounding computing, telecommunications, network technologies, stem cells, synthetic biology, and a host of others literally did not even exist when I was in school. And so I, and hundreds of thousands of other students who matriculated from US schools during the interval learned a huge amount of subject matter that was outdated long before we were truly material to the US economy. We survived in the profession by learning how to solve new problems as they came up. We had to be creative and innovative despite the fact that nobody had ever specifically taught us how to be so.

Recent surveys of executives running the most technology-oriented of the Fortune 500 companies, universities and research laboratories were almost unanimous when asked what skills they were looking for in this century's future work force. Almost none of them asked for the traditional subject matter that is the focus of most today's standardized tests. Instead, they almost unanimously were looking for creativity, the ability to innovate and come up with novel solutions to new problems that had never been seen before.

"Critical thinking" and "thinking outside the box" are often mentioned as goals of educational approaches, and yet even those programs that tout hands-on and inquiry-based pedagogy are almost universally very structured with pre-determined "correct" outcomes. Where is the room for creativity? Where can a student actually discover something new, or create something that never existed before?

In contrast, at WISE, we help schools build environments that are specifically designed to purposely foster creativity, and offer places and times for students to regularly practice fundamental technical skills while creating their own unique solutions to progressively more complicated and extensive challenges, and better yet, discovering and pursuing original lines of inquiry of their own.

This effort turns out to cover a lot of ground from organization to logistics, to training, and even includes financial support. But just building a space and populating it isn't enough, because aside from a few exceptions, students exposed to an open environment for the first time have no idea how to exercise their own initiative and begin learning, exploring, and innovating on their own. There needs to be a concerted effort to design and support introductory activities that teach fundamental creative and innovation-oriented skills and philosophies. Some of the recent growth in robotics and rocketry type competitions has really helped in this direction.

The good news is that we now have a pretty good idea of how to build these environments all the way down to the Kindergarten level. If we manage to achieve some of the fundamental goals of our organization, children at WISE schools will be specifically challenged to begin innovating at an early age and get regular practice all the way through high school.

The key is that lab and inquiry-based assignments need to consistently have regular open-ended components where there is no specific "answer" but rather there exist unlimited avenues to approach a challenge. These sorts of activities will be a strong focus of this web log on an ongoing basis. Stay tuned to learn more about how we have set up specific labs and activities.