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The Era of Young Innovators: Looking Beyond Universities To Source Talents
New submitter billylo writes "Tech heavy industries are constantly looking for new sources of innovations. But where are the best place to find them? Increasingly, businesses are looking beyond universities and source ideas from savvy high schoolers. Cases in point: High school programming team finished in the Top 5 of MasterCard's NXT API challenge (3rd one down the list) last weekend in Toronto; Waterloo's Computing Contest high-school level winners [PDF] tackled complex problems like these [PDF]; the FIRST robotics competition requires design, CAD, manufacturing and programming all done by high schoolers. Do you have other good examples on how to encourage high schoolers to become young innovators?
Do you have any other successful examples?"
it's not because high-schoolers are naive and cheap, no no no, it's because of "innovation"! Innovation for all! But keep ther 19th century social model though; innovation not wanted there.
and get them in the shop to learn how to fabercate their new impossible desgins
3d printers and cad goes hand in hand with mill work, files and sandpaper
I know there's bad English in the title; I took it from a song in Huckleberry Finn.
We all seem to be wired to do something. It may be sports, music, art, construction, cars, whatever. I know I have been driven with curiosity of all things electronic/scientific as far back as I can remember. Its like spots on a leopard - I came this way. I have noted others are exactly the same way as far as their wiring goes, whether it be likes/dislikes/foods/sexual orientation/ whatever.
Its easy to find kids with a bent to do this. They will flock to things like science fairs and techie conventions.
They will do this, even with considerable social rejection for doing so.
Face it, techie kids are not near as encouraged as one in sports or some sort of leadership skill.
If you want one of these - catch one before he has been burned out by the system.
Today's business environment is full of very highly paid suit-guys who are more fruit inspector than anything else, rejecting everything that is not perfect. People only handle so much rejection before they pass on doing what they love as a vocation then do it independently. A suit guy more obsessed with conformity and respect for authority is not apt to attract any creative types to his company. I think the kids have wised up that few of us stand a chance to be gainfully employed in the tech sector unless it is something like Google or Facebook. We can't get past the suit guy at the personnel office - you know - the guy who could not bias a transistor into the linear region if his life depended on it, but yet his signature determines whether or not we get employed, or can even speak to anyone knowledgeable in the field who could make an employment decision.
Yes, I am jaded, but that has been my experience. I talk to a lot of kids about this field - and advise them to do this if you are wired to do it - otherwise there are lots more very highly profitable ways to earn a living. Banking and finance especially, One gets far more remuneration from owning rather than working under today's tax laws.
There's always Jack Andraka, who happened upon a method for cancer detection. Like many great discoveries, however, it was by chance - background of the discovery is readable across the interwebs. This year at the Intel Internation Science and Engineering Fair (which I attended, competing Computer Science of course), he placed but third in his category, amoungst many other third place winners.
you can innovate at 30, but can't. There's a reason.
You can innovate at 20, but can't. There's a reason.
You can innovate at 15.... it's the same reason.
The reason: having a mentor.
The NXT, FIRST and other competitions work cause the teams have very experienced mentors with the goal to promote innovation.
Colleges used to have mentors, but because of IP competitiveness, marketing hyping bright minds (hence mentoring stops) so quickly, mentoring in college is dropping off. Especially as college kids try to negotiate deals with VCs like a basketball player.
And if you're 30, no one with mentor you cause every mentor thinks you're out to steal IP or just hyping up your skills.
In the end the VCs still win cause the labor is cheap (high schoolers) commpared to college kids who want to be the next Zuckerberg
you almost have it...19th Century *Business* model.
you're absolutely right the industry doesn't know what 'innovation' is b/c many tech leaders (broadly) got to be in that position not by 'innovation' but by sheer luck, stealing other's work, or by being a lackey.
M$'s government contract aided ascendence is the perfect example. They scaled up from the garage b/c Gates & Co. were willing to do w/e IBM wanted. IBM, of course, had just gotten a huge government to put PC's on every government desk.
Who needs to do R&D and 'innovate' when the government guarantees your company a revenue stream and captive market???
The industry is killing itself from hype...it's like a human eating only SweetTarts candy everyday...it'll kill you eventually
Thank you Dave Raggett
New ideas are always floating around, it's just a matter of listening. I've been proposing the idea of a dynamic relational database that is less "stiff" than the current crop of databases for projects that need a rapid launch, but nobody seems to want to build one, yet can't explain why other than "it's too different, unfamiliar". (Most of the weak-points have been addressed or shored up against.)
The bottleneck seems to be between the idea and the implementation, not lack of ideas. Maybe it's lack of guts.
Table-ized A.I.
This is not, by any chance, connected to a general trend in the US to scale down funding for research and education? To me it looks like an act of desparation, like trying to revive the record industry with a season of X-factor.
There is no denying that young people have a lot of creativity and talent, but talent is only a small part of success; you may say that talent is "instant success" - you just need to add about 90% water in the form of sweat.
I was looking at this... the robot fighting etc... I don't think its actually spurring innovation because there are too many rules. The format etc is too constrained.
Innovation is essentially about thinking outside the box. If your competition includes a box you have to stay inside of then its inherently not testing for innovation.
What if I want to fight their robot with my genetically engineered cyborg spiders? That's way more innovative but probably not allowed.
I don't know... the whole thing just looks a little too kiche.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If you look at the addresses, that is in Canada (Ontario = ON, Nova Scotia = NS)
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
the kindergarten Lego league
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
""Superiority" is a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951. It depicts an arms race, and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its own organizational flaws and its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new. The story was at one point required reading for an industrial design course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]"
Of course, that ignores the irony implicit in most high-tech military systems, which I explain here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Maybe if more people, including high schoolers, realized that, the world would be a place with less needless suffering and more joy.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Yep. That goes a long way towards explaining the complete lack of innovation in the computer industry. Basically nothing has improved or even changed in the last 30 years."
More true than one might think at first: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/08/09/1641249/back-to-the-future-of-programming
See also:
"The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" by Alan Kay
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007007a_revolution.pdf
http://archive.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/kay.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
Personally, cross-platform reasonable speedy VisualWorks Smalltalk from the 1990s in many ways still has not been surpassed (except in the sense it was not free and open source and somewhat lesser stuff like Python and now Java is). The Newton's 1990s view of a PDA with integrated soups of data is still (in some ways) advanced beyond Android. Or from:
http://inventors.about.com/od/istartinventions/a/internet.htm
"Vannevar Bush first proposed the basics of hypertext in 1945 [in "As We May Think"]. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators) in 1990."
Project Xanadu was around in the 1980s doing Hypertext, inspired by Theodore Sturegon's 1950 short story "The Skills of Xanadu".
Don't confuse the eventual implementation of part of old ideas (like Kay's 1970s DynaBook vision being realized in part in today's laptops and smartphones) with the notion of conceptual progress.
Even much of robotics and AI is just old ideas finally being more workable with better hardware.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
"The stupendous growth and competitiveness of the computer industry is one reason. A less appreciated one is that intelligent machine research did not make steady progress in its first fifty years, it marked time for thirty of them! Though general computer power grew a hundred thousand fold from 1960 to 1990, the computer power available to AI programs barely budged from 1 MIPS during those three decades. "
Still, it is also true there are no doubt many innovations now lurking here or there for which we have not yet hear much of. As WIlliam Gibson said:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-here-it-s-just-not-evenly
"The future is already here â" it's just not evenly distributed."
Much of what young kids are interested in is what they have seen in movies, read in stories, or played with in games, and so on. True, they may sometimes put things together in new ways. But its still very often old, old ideas they are working with.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
No way. I am fully in support of employing kids as young as 13 in intellectual labor. After all, that's when they know everything.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Need to have more of the apprenticeship system or even just more schools with an trades / tech setting.
We are pushing to many people into the older University system that was not really build for that as well being used to try to tech skills that should not be in an University.
Also the push for all to go to University some have to dumb down as well.
Many people are simply not so much exposed to these events / competitions, but still go on to become better students at undergraduate level and beyond.
They bring out talent from high school students, but at that point it is still far, far from real innovation. The problem setters and mentors are often university students anyway. These things encourage students to go beyond their high-school curriculum and think cleverly, so they have some great skills to use in industrial or academic settings. They are capable of entering the workforce, capable of joining and growing new businesses, but there is nothing special about their ability to "innovate". They still have a lot to learn, and in terms of cleverness there are many, many comparable university graduates out here.
Inventing really new things require some luck, and unless you're extremely lucky it would require extensive exploration. One page of new mathematics requires lots of thinking and learning. Even a prodigy like Erik Demaine spent 6 years on his PhD. Being smart doesn't mean you can always create something new - new, valid ideas are so scarce and hard to reach, and there is immense competition, so you still need to work hard for a long time to actually produce the results.
Sometimes you find prodigies.. they reach adult levels of performance at a young age, but then, by the time they get to college, they aren't advancing anymore, and now they're just the same as everyone else.
The question answers itself, because the 16-year old tech geniuses from 2006 have become the 23-year old tech geniuses of today. Presumably any "tech genius" will become more genius as they grow older from 16 to 23. So today's 23-year old whizzes should always be superior than today's 16-year old whizzes. And after another seven years, some of today's 16-year olds will become 2020's best 23-year olds, and should outshine 2020's best 16-year olds, who won't be 23 until 2027. The better question to ask is, at what age is person going to peak in technological ability?
The bigger fallacy is who enters these competitions? They might attract exceptional high school students looking to distinguish themselves in their college applications, but your best college/university kids and young professionals are going to be too busy with other ventures and commitments to participate in these contests and hackathons. If you've got a million-dollar idea, you're not going to waste a weekend on a contest that can net you a couple of thousand dollars.
In reality, most of the young professionals participating in these events are either unemployed or underemployed. They're hardly the best representatives of their generation's talent.
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You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
I love this. I'm going to make a point to remember it and use it.
It succinctly describes what unchecked consumerism has done in ways that are difficult to dodge.
It's a-political...in points out a truth in a way that demands clear action but cannot be easily trolled.
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's pretty simple. Thrown money at the problem. A lot of it. Stupid amounts of it. Make the rewards for being a nerd as good or better than those showered all over the jocks. Make sure that a lot of these major geek kids get full scholarships, signing bonuses, and access to cutting edge lab facilities when they get to college. But you also have to add a fame component to it. These kids need to be put on TV and written up in mainstream magazines. And not just once every few years. Not just once a year but followed regularly as they move from high-school science fair star, through college, and all the way to startup company.
over the years. When a person gets wise to how things really work, how corrupt industry is, and how the media, industry and government takes everything and destroys it, they wise-up and simply drop-out.
True innovators don't care about making big corporations money, or being part of a system that is based on the lowest common denominators of greed and a warped form of self interest.
Big business wants to corrupt and brainwash kids, that's all this article is about. Creating an amoral class of dunces that can help prop-up the true entitled class of MBA's and polysci parasites that steal other people's brilliant work and market it as their own.