From a prominent educator, author, and founder of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group comes a provocative look at why innovation is today’s most essential real-world skill and what young people need from parents, teachers, and employers to become the innovators of America’s future.In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner examines why innovation is imperative to our global competitiveness and profiles today’s most compelling young innovators. He reveals how they succeeded because of parents, teachers, and mentors whose unconventional methods nurtured and developed curiosity, imagination, creativity, and initiative. In their experiences, Wagner discovered a surprisingly consistent pattern of play, passion, and purpose: a childhood of unstructured play led to finding their passionsoften as adolescentsand the pursuit of those passions then evolved into a deeper and more mature sense of purpose as young adults. It is this combination of play, passion, and purpose that is key to developing young people’s innovative capacity. Wagner then looks more widely at the education systemespecially collegesand how we can better parent, teach, mentor, and manage young people to pick up where that system has failed. He takes readers into the most innovative and cutting-edge schools and workplaces in the country, those that have been the most successful in fostering the skills needed for innovation: collaboration, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, and dynamic problem-solving. Throughout, he emphasizes ways that play, passion, and purpose can be incorporated into the culture of home, school, and work. The result is a timely and optimistic manifesto that will change how we look at innovation and the next generation’s potential to be changemakers.

Tony Wagner is currently the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the founder and former co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Wagner consults widely to public and independent schools and foundations around the country and has served as Senior Advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A former high school teacher, K-8 principal, and university professor in teacher education, Wagner is a highly sought-after speaker and the author of four books, including The Global Achievement Gap.