Book Review: Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change

the World by Tony Wagner

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World utilizes extensive profiles
of young visionaries and the adults who facilitate their creativity.

With a brief reflection upon his former contribution of the Seven Survival Skills from his previous work,
The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner now brings his latest research findings to the table, offering us a
fresh amalgamation of new insight on the culture of innovation.

Toward the construction of a theoretical framework, after conducting 150 interviews—with respondents
being among the world’s best and brightest working in STEM-related fields, entrepreneurs, and social
pioneers—the author reveals a metric of essential characteristics in connection with caliber of
innovation. Wagner posits the core qualities of innovators as being perseverance, a willingness to
experiment, take calculated risks, tolerate failure, an aptitude for critical thinking, and a creative
capacity for “design thinking”—with special emphasis on the latter.

Often with benevolent intent of upholding the annals of the institution, the gatekeepers of society—
parents, teachers, mentors and employers—often impose their own version of the way things ought to
be, and embodied within this status quo are also constraints. The author sheds light on the importance
of suspending judgment for the sake of allowing a young person the liberty to see things differently—for
curiosity to bud into experimentation. This practice, when embraced as a lifestyle, is said to build trust
in one’s creative capacity, and therefore serves to empower the individual to take risks and accomplish
breakthroughs in discovery and restructuring.

The author’s central premise is that to reverse the economic decline of the US, a strategy of nurturing
young people who utilize innovation and creativity to build processes and products that enhance the
quality of life and spur economic development is vital.

Predicting how to educate young people to become innovators is a new take on the old argument of
nature vs. nurture. Wagner is decidedly on the side of nurture. He posits an approach to skills capacity-
building to launch a new American creativity gold rush toward catalyzing the growth and expansion of
the American economy.

The work is both descriptive and prescriptive. The former, in the use of vignettes of model students and
those in their relational constellation who played an active role in creativity capacity-building. The latter
is centered on identifying and defining keys to the ideation process, designed to serve as a referent in
innovation development.

“Play, passion, purpose” is the progression mantra that permeates the authors prose. It supports the
idea of intentionality and flexibility on multiple levels of analysis.

Play, being the idea that unstructured, free time cultivates creativity—rather than the all too convoluted
scheduled lives that adolescents and teenagers currently live.
Passion, being the emotional and intellectual engagement in an undertaking or an enterprise that
grounds the initiative, thus supporting the sustainability of effort.

Purpose, being the structural vehicle which translates passion into the discernment of a focal point for
continued efforts—whether it be a social cause or a quest for invention.

This continuing theme of advancement is interwoven throughout the narratives. Each is described in
detail in the illustrations of the evolving life stories of those represented.

A new paradigm? Yes.

Adaptable and adoptable systemically? Not presently very likely.

The very systems of the educational establishment which Wagner lambastes are a formidable barrier to
the kind of macro change he desires.

Wagner considers the education institution as, “inherently conservative.” His list includes: un-
imaginative teachers, deification of standardized tests, AP course content learning not conceptual
thinking, and the lack of intentionality.

All is not lost, there are progressive entities, Franklin Olin College of Engineering is a repeated exemplar
that, “Transmits attitudes, motivations, and behaviors versus mere knowledge” and a “real world
context for understanding what they’ve been asked to learn.”

Creating Innovators interestingly practices what Wagner preaches, in terms of providing a combination
of, “the best of the 15th century technology—the printed pages—and the best of the twenty-first century
—smartphones and QR codes” to expand content.

As a final evaluation, despite its anecdotal style and abrupt organizational style, the content of the book
recommends it to those interested in new paradigm pathways to progress in reversing the erosion of
American growth.