Does it seem to anyone else that we are in an innovation wasteland? Even our movies have become a list of retreads from the 70's and 80's. Innovation Starvation, by Neal Stephenson. explores potential reasons for why innovation and invention seem to have reached a level of stagnation. One interesting idea, though not the one I wish to write, is to blame Science Fiction writers who have ceased to write about alternate realities with powerful beneficial technologies. Instead, these writers now choose to write about the dangers and potential harmful implications or results from current technologies effectively leaving engineers, whom it is strongly implied are less than creative, struggling to come up with their own ideas.
While this is certainly interesting, of greater concern for me is the assertion that the Internet, which provides immediate and exponentially growing availability to information at the fingertips of anyone at anytime, has created an atmosphere that stifles innovation. What? How can this be? According to Stephenson, the managers of for-profit corporations utilize the Internet as part of their risk analysis research and, because so much information is available, the decisions made are more likely to be low-risk, high success, quick turn-to-profit plans. In essence, the Internet has take away of the uncertainty that often led to the failures which Thomas Edison indicated were beneficial for his work stating: "I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."
In the Before Internet (BI) age, failures were the means to success. In general, people did not sit around and have "eureka!" moments they collaborated. At the 2010 TED Conference, Stephen Johnson provided a very different vision regarding the role of the Internet. Johnson believes the Internet aids rather than limits creativity and innovation. In his speech Where Good Ideas Come From, he explained how the Internet functions as the modern day collaboration equivalent of the gatherings at coffee houses during the Age of the Enlightenment. In this context, a location of collaboration and sharing is the key for innovation.
Within Johnson's concept, the problem is not the ability to share ideas but rather that fact that those most likely to innovate are now in the employ of for-profit corporations. These corporations limit innovation to ideas that have the greatest potential to result in immediate profit while having the least potential to result in even minuscule loss. Since society moving innovations often rely on failures, providing opportunity for the inventor to refine and develop further their idea, profit-based, cost-risk formula corporate control is counterproductive to the innovation process. Within the confines of a for-profit organization, collaboration is necessarily limited to the workers under the employ of each individual corporate entity, further diminishing the potential for the collaborative sharing of ideas found to stimulate innovation.
I know this is a long post and some of you reading may be wondering just what this has to do with education. Let's examine the school choice movement. Charter and other for-profit schools are being developed under the idea that competition within the education system, much like the theory that competition between corporations, will increase the overall performance of schools because the best schools will thrive and innovate while the worst will cease to exist. But under what criteria, performance, and standards will these corporate modeled for-profit schools show increases in learning? Based upon the current corporate model and the resulting stifling of innovation that results, for-profit schools will show improvement on the current, the tried and true, the areas that are safe and low risk. Is this education?
If allowed to continue and thrive, the school choice movement will move education towards the same problems found within other profit based organizations. We will cease to develop and encourage innovation because attempts at innovation involve risk. Through risk analysis, for-profit organizations strive to minimize risk while increasing profit. For-profit schools will move the Innovation Starvation from the adult realm into the realm of childhood. How soon after will we observe Kindergarten students who no longer have the creative capacity to color that apple green, paint the sky purple, or make the multicolored play-dough hamburger.
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