How -- and why -- to teach innovation in our schools

It’s wonderful to hear President Obama call for a nationwide emphasis on innovation, but it raises an interesting challenge: Where will all those innovators come from? Currently, we are chasing testable competency in academic core skills. It is quite a different thing to try to educate future innovators. We don't test for that. An innovation curriculum requires an emphasis on what I am going to call, for lack of a preexisting term, the Five I’s: Imagination, Inquiry, Invention, Implementation, and Initiative (the latter being a foundational trait that enables the other four). Here is my take on how to teach each of the Five I’s of innovation in our schools.