Innovation through Play, Passion and Purpose

“Increasingly in the twenty-first century, what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know.  The interest in and ability to create new knowledge to solve new problems is the single most important skill that all students must master today.  All successful innovators have mastered the ability to learn on their own “in the moment” and then apply that knowledge in new ways.”  -Tony Wagner
I had the opportunity to read Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner as part of St. Mary’s Summer Reading Program for its employees and absolutely loved the book.  It was a refreshingly optimistic view of today’s youth and the endless possibilities for being innovators that our global, connected world provides them.  This book looks at approximately 10 innovators in a variety of fields and tracks them from their childhood experience through college and into their current fields of work.  What I appreciated most was the diversity of fields and backgrounds that these innovators represented and that despite this diversity there were some common threads that put these stand outs on the track of innovation.
Critical to this track were supportive parents.  Parents who encouraged their children to tinker and pursue their passions without judgment about those passions from their parents.  What surprised me most is that these parents limited the “scheduling” of their children’s time as well as the number of toys and gadgets the children had to play with.  Instead, they focused on getting their children to use their imagination.  Reading books was also a valued activity in these homes.  The other critical factor in the lives of the innovators studied was a mentor who allowed them to pursue their passions in nontraditional ways that provided real world experiences for trying out their ideas.  This mentor came in many different forms from outlier college professors who taught innovative classes to community members and activists.

The innovators in this  book followed a path of play, passion, and purpose.  What started as play for these innovators turned into passion, and then a sense of purpose for using those passions to do meaningful work.  Unfortunately, our traditional education system doesn’t generally nurture innovators and most in this book had to look outside traditional avenues to follow the innovation track.  There are a number of high schools and colleges that are restructuring traditional models of education and a good chunk of this book looks at some of these spaces of innovative learning like High Tech High, MIT Media Lab and Olin College.