Innovation education shouldn't be a typo

If you do a search for innovation education, you will find dozens of pages of press, initiatives, and conferences for something quite different—education innovation. With rare exception, “innovation education” is a typo.* But could it be that this typo is what we need to innovate in education?

There’s more than a semantic problem here, which might explain why we haven’t embraced the typo more. We do not understood innovators well enough, so we don’t think we can teach innovation to young thinkers and doers.

When we think about entrepreneurial, technological, cultural, or intellectual creators, we tend to find them either deeply mysterious or perfectly rational—though often lucky in their achievements. To understand them, we construct theories (pet or otherwise) or scrap together top-five-attribute lists, most of which crumble at the first hint of a counterexample. But even if successful, these efforts would not provide the right basis for educating future innovators. Theories explain or describe; they don’t instruct.

Despite this poverty of understanding, we actually can do better. If we assume innovation is a good thing, then we ought to make sure we do what we can to encourage it. Otherwise we hand over to chance what could be much more regular: the development of innovators.

One initial step: build an innovator’s sense of the world. In my work with college students on their career and venture development, I’ve been struck by the contrast between students who, as I’ve put it elsewhere, order off the menu and those who pick from the options available to them. The entire frame of reference for future innovators reveals the world around them to be a plastic construction—something that has constraints, of course, but which is at bottom a medium for the development of new things we care about (whether that’s an idea, technology, or social movement). The world we have now is largely the sediment of past invention, innovation, and creation. The world we want next won’t exist without our creative efforts. The students who see this are the ones who more fervently design research projects outside the classroom, tinker with objects and ideas to invent something new, or start building a venture around a commercial or social insight. This doesn’t mean they all have good ideas or will execute successfully. But they do at least try, and you don’t win if you don’t play.

The promising piece is that education can more regularly deliver this sense of the world. Especially if we start early.

Book-learning is not enough, but it certainly helps if done right. I had to wait until college before I was finally taught the problems to which calculus was a solution, for example. In high school, I only learned a set of techniques to perform, rather than the concrete problems and the spirit of discovery to which Leibniz and Newton were sensitive. How much of a difference would it make if we taught the civil rights movement by guiding students through its complexity and led them to recreate the innovative social ideas and institutions that continue to influence us? This, rather than a series of facts and superhero personalities.

This book-learning becomes learning-by-doing when coupled with real opportunities for action. When our youth turn their growing capacity for invention, problem-solving, and creativity toward doing something in their schools, communities, and larger world, then we start to cultivate the next generation of innovators. Don’t worry about innovating education; educate innovators and we’ll be fine.

* I use the term “typo” broadly. More technically, I’m playing with a chiasmus.

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James Jeffries is Director of Career Development at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Founder of Exaption LLC, and Doctor of Philosophy.