The solution to our economic and social challenges is the same:
creating a viable and sustainable economy that creates good jobs without
polluting the planet. And there is general agreement as to what that
new economy must be based on. One word: innovation
And 77 percent agreed, “the greatest innovations of the 21st
century will be those that have helped to address human needs more than
those that had created the most profit
Disruptive or transformative innovation, on the other hand, is
about creating a new or fundamentally different product or service that
disrupts existing markets and displaces formerly dominant technologies
Finally, Brown writes that design thinkers are, above all,
collaborators: “The increasing complexity of products, services, and
experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the
reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator.
People who are successful at Google also have a bias towards
action—you see something broken and you fix it. You are smart enough to
spot problems, but you don’t whine about them or wait for somebody else
to fix them. You ask, ‘How can I make things better?’ And collaboration
is so essential to everything that we do—we prize the ability to
recognize and learn from people around you, who have very different
kinds of expertise.
Too many teachers and employers still reward the “old school”
behaviors of deference to authority and striving for “success,”
conventionally defined—and count on carrots and sticks for motivation.
The result is that many in the Innovation Generation are skeptical of
adult authority and the institutions that their elders have presided
over. School is a game the Innovation Generation knows they have to play
to get “credentialed,” but they do it with as little effort as possible
The sense of purpose can take many forms. But the one that emerged
most frequently in my interviews and in the interviews by the authors
of “the Innovator’s DNA” is the desire to somehow “make a difference”
“To me, empowerment means students can go out and apply what
they’ve learned to the problems that they’ve never seen before with
parts that they’ve never used before.”
Apple is run like a start-up. It is a company that is continuously
innovating, through rapid prototyping and iterating. Rethinking what
the future will be. Yes, you have to make a profit to build a successful
company, but real success means putting that profit back into
continuous innovation.
The D-Lab philosophy is very much experiential—real projects for
real people and real feedback on your projects. Too often students don’t
get meaningful feedback on their work. In terms of design, our focus is
on people who live on less than two dollars per day. We also believe in
building the capacity of people we work with in the developing
world—foster the belief that they are creators, designers—and that our
students should value indigenous knowledge.
Instead, we need to encourage students to give voice to their
beliefs and to support their intrinsic empathy and commitment to justice
But I don’t see these young innovators buying into being the
“twice as” generation. They are defining their own, different American
Dream—one that values passion and purpose, in which their priority is
making a difference more than making money. As one young innovator said,
“I want to live a meaningful life with just enough money to support
myself and a family.
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