Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World

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.

In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner examines why innovation is imperative to our global competitiveness and profiles today’s most compelling young innovators. He reveals how they succeeded because of parents, teachers, and mentors whose unconventional methods nurtured and developed curiosity, imagination, creativity, and initiative. In their experiences, Wagner discovered a surprisingly consistent pattern of play, passion, and purpose: a childhood of unstructured play led to finding their passions—often as adolescents—and the pursuit of those passions then evolved into a deeper and more mature sense of purpose as young adults. It is this combination of play, passion, and purpose that is key to developing young people’s innovative capacity.

Wagner then looks more widely at the education system—especially colleges—and how we can better parent, teach, mentor, and manage young people to pick up where that system has failed. He takes readers into the most innovative and cutting-edge schools and workplaces in the country, those that have been the most successful in fostering the skills needed for innovation: collaboration, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, and dynamic problem-solving. Throughout, he emphasises ways that play, passion, and purpose can be incorporated into the culture of home, school, and work. The result is a timely and optimistic manifesto that will change how we look at innovation and the next generation’s potential to be change makers.