Newsroom: Innovation in the News
Nine States, D.C. Win Race for Aid to Schools The Wall Street Journal
By: Stephanie Banchero, Neil King Jr.
August 25, 2010
The Obama administration awarded $3.4 billion to nine states and the District of Columbia in a national competition to encourage school reform that spurred far-reaching changes in many cash-starved states, but left some losers bitter over the murky standards.
The awards unveiled Tuesday are part of the administration's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" competition, a program that set in motion a national effort to tie teacher evaluations to student achievement, increase the number of charter schools and overhaul low-performing schools.
Read Full ArticleNot Business as Usual (And That's Good)TIME – The Detroit Blog
By: Karen Dybis
August 24, 2010
Today, the Accelerator Network will announce its “Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition,” an international business plan competition. The goal is to get people at all levels of business to start thinking about how to grow – and invest – in Michigan. It is the largest business-plan competition in the world. Yes, world. Not exaggerating.
Read Full ArticleWho Has Innovative Ideas? Employees.The trick is knowing how to tap into them. One answer: innovation communities.
The Wall Street Journal
By: JC Spender, Bruce Strong
August 23, 2010
Let's take the mystery out of innovation and its inspirations.
Most great ideas for enhancing corporate growth and profits aren't discovered in the lab late at night, or in the isolation of the executive suite. They come from the people who daily fight the company's battles, who serve the customers, explore new markets and fend off the competition.
Read Full ArticleThe Golden Age of InnovationDespite stereotypes of entrepreneurs as fresh-faced youngsters, new research has found that older workers are more likely to innovate than their under-35 counterparts.
Newsweek
By: Stefan Theil
August 20, 2010
Peach-fuzzed entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, 19 when he founded Facebook, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both 23 when they developed Google, have created a collective image of the successful innovator as youthful, brash, and brilliant. In turn, we’ve been taught that with middle age come calcified habits, outdated skills, and an aversion to risk. Sounds bad, right?
Read Full ArticleHow to Close the Achievement GapNewsweek
Op-Ed: Mona Mourshed, Fenton Whelan
August 16, 2010
All over the world, your chances of success in school and life depend more on your family circumstances than on any other factor. By age three, kids with professional parents are already a full year ahead of their poorer peers. They know twice as many words and score 40 points higher on IQ tests. By age 10, the gap is three years. By then, some poor children have not mastered basic reading and math skills, and many never will: this is the age at which failure starts to become irreversible.
A few school systems seem to have figured out how to erase these gaps.
Read Full ArticleIs Administration Moving The Ball With Innovation?National Journal – Education Experts Blog
By: Eliza Krigman, [Numerous Contributors]
August 9, 2010
[Questions posed on National Journal’s Education Experts Blog]
Over the next couple of years, roughly a billion dollars will be spent on innovation in education through federal grants and private initiatives. A significant chunk of that money, $650 million, will be distributed to the 49 winners of the Investing In Innovation (i3) competition announced last week. Some education analysts -- Rick Hess, Tom Vander Ark, Alexander Russo and others -- posit that the competition, as evidenced by the winners, is really rewarding best practices and credibility, as opposed to innovative or transformational education practices.
With the i3 program, has the administration invested enough in proposals that bring truly innovative practices to the education system? Is America doing enough to leverage the benefits of modern technology in the education sector?
Read Full Article
