Teaching Innovation

What this episode covers

Climb down the rabbit hole of web browsing and you’ll realize that teaching innovation is all the rage. Not innovation in teaching, but teaching about innovation. Google it. Clearly, this is a topic that breeds opinions like … well, you know. Click through the first dozen hits, or so. Now, you know why JFK once said that “too often …. we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Who doesn’t have an opinion about innovation? Haven’t you daydreamed about making a fortune from chance discovery — you know, like curing cancer with the mold from your shower stall? (That’s no excuse for not cleaning, by the way. It wasn’t last year nor the year before, either.) What a dream: a disappearing wart on your big toe leads to a call from Pfizer and $93 million for exclusive rights. After you drifted through that a few times, you embellished it with a corner office at HBS and a permanent appointment as entrepreneur in residence. Dreams do not experts make, though, even if the local school board didn’t see right through you. After all, they were probably too busy with book bans. So, now you’re heading up development of an innovation curriculum for the high school. Woo hoo! For the teens, it’ll be like car privileges without chores. (You know, that shower really does need work, and there’s a bottle of Clorox right next to the pile of clean towels). Why drudge through grammar, civics and science classes, when you can get right to learning how to make billions. The kids’ll tell you that’s how Mark did it: he skipped his classes, spent a little time with the Winkelvoss twins and, voila, Facebook. Easy peasy? Some of us think not. Dig past the urban myths, and you’ll find that Zuckerberg’s academic creds include Phillips Exeter Academy. Perhaps he skipped all of his classes there, too, but we doubt it. His getting into Harvard speaks otherwise. Are reading, writing and arithmetic passé? Do students really need the basics, or can they get right to classes on innovation — knowledge be damned? Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program, and judge for yourself.

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