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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?"
Innovation is one thing, it's a completely different thing to create business from it. We are missing out a lot of good innovations because the ideas get stifled or the innovator gets pushed down because the investors thinks that it's a bad idea. (The idea may be bad for their business, so therefore they don't promote it)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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
And as a side note: if you need faith restored in the upcoming (my) generation, take a day visit to ISEF when it rolls around near you - they rotate around most major US cities, or even just read about it if you cannot - it's very much worth it. There's pretty incredible, mind-blowing research at every other booth.
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.
Kids like that are a good example of what can be done by high schoolers. They also show that universities are very useful. Jack did his work with a professor, based on published work by several other professors and students. It's because guys like George Whitesides and Charlie Johnson publish and talk about their work that he was able to pick it up. Working in a well run lab is an inherently collaborative experience, and experiencing it early can be very useful.
Benefits flow both ways. Sometimes in academic groups, there's such a focus on doing funded research that people forget to try things just because they should. Young scientists are very good at pushing the older guys to keep trying out new stuff.
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.
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.