Book of the Week (June 18, 2012)

Creating Innovators: the making of young people who will change the world
By Tony Wagner

Call number:  LB 1607.5 .W33 2012
Companion Website:  http://creatinginnovators.com/

Publisher's Description:  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.

Creating Innovators will not just be a book about innovation. It will be innovative in its format, as well. Noted filmmaker Bob Compton, who teamed up with Tony to make “The Finland Phenomenon,” has produced more than 60 original videos that expand on key ideas and passages in the book through interviews with young innovators, their parents, teachers, mentors, and senior executives from some of the world’s most innovative companies; footage taken in highly innovative schools and companies, like IDEO, is also included in the book. These short 1-2 minute videos will be embedded in the e-book and also accessible in the print version by scanning QR codes that will be placed throughout the book.