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Does America need more innovators?We posed the question to highlight how innovation has become a national imperative pursued through the transformation of people. Societal goals such as regional development and international competitiveness take shape through initiatives to make innovators. Contributors have shown that such programs are ubiquitous and pervasive. Innovator initiatives target all age groups and career stages, from kindergarteners to senior scientists. Innovators train in formal and informal educational settings, supported by public and private funding. The innovator imperative operates at all scales, from individual garage inventors to interdisciplinary teams, regional innovation districts, and global federations.But asking the question implies doubt. It calls attention to the fact that the demand for innovation is at a crossroads. The contributors to this volume join journalists, policy advocates, and scholars in challenging the assumptions and impact of innovator initiatives. They have demonstrated that innovation training programs are historically prone to failure, they have questioned the efficacy of supposedly universal models, they have documented gender and racial disparities across the enterprise, and they have argued that innovation-once a means for solving societal problemshas become an end unto itself.Finally, we inquired about the need for innovators to open a dialogue about the purpose of innovator initiatives and whom they serve. We assembled champions, critics, and reformers to explore innovation's contradictory dimensions; to engage practitioners directly; and to do so via a reflective approach that treated participants symmetrically. Contributors collectively contextualized the assumptions, goals, practices, and consequences of the demand for innovators. This dialogue fosters opportunities for seeing how the imperative can be remade.

Contributors 375Index 379Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) declared in its 2015 report "Innovation: An American Imperative." To be a "global innovation leader" requires federal support, tax incentives, the pursuit of emerging technologies, a welcome environment for talent, better STEM education, and a meritocratic culture. But, warns "Innovation" and its five hundred signatories from Google to the American Dairy Science Association, "now is not the time to rest on past success." While competitors have adopted our playbook, the United States has stagnated, putting the American dream at risk. 1 Variations on the AAAS's manifesto dominate visions of the future of the United States. Corporate executives, government leaders, and local schoolboards agree that Americans must innovate. The imperative is remarkably capacious. Innovation today describes everything from the commercialization of new technology to economic policy, design, artistic imagination, and grassroots community renewal.The demand for innovation is as much a call for new kinds of people as it is for national investment. Implicit in the AAAS's plan is an imperative to create innovators, the citizens who will make new discoveries, disrupt old ways, solve once intractable social problems, create wealth, and ensure national supremacy. These innovators include not only engineers and scientists but also entrepreneurs, inventors, designers, and civic leaders with the mindsets and tools of "change makers."The movement to cultivate a new generation of innovators has fueled the rise of innovation experts. These champions of innovation lead initiatives to make innovators at all career stages. Business gurus sell how-to books, while universities such as Stanford and Arizona State offer models for producing entrepreneurs, start-up companies, and regional growth. 2 Innovator 1 The Innovator Imperative Matthew Wisnioski The Innovator Imperative 3 views, the contributors assembled here agree that the widespread effort to educate and train new innovators has become a dominant imperative of our time, one that is increasingly on trial. In what follows, policymakers, design executives, and educators explore the imperative alongside historians, ethnographers, and social critics. Contributors ask themselves and one another: Why did programs for making innovators emerge? How have they evolved? What is their track record? What are their collective assumptions and shortcomings? How might they be improved? What is their future? Championing Innovation From Thomas Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, stories abound of technological wizards whose very force of personality drives breakthroughs and generates fortunes. 6 These young, gritty, and creative men (in such tales they are almost always men) overcome failure and naysayers to create products that remake the world. With varying shades of plausibility, their biographical accounts offer the prospect that you, too, can follow in their footsteps to become the next...

Corporate social responsibility has a chameleon-like character. It exists as part of a larger ecology of related concepts: sustainability, corporate citizenship, business accountability, social performance, sustainable development, creating shared value, and ESG (environmental, social and governance). Its definition shifts by industry, geographic context, and company invoking the term. Some academics dismiss CSR as greenwash, while others uncritically treat it as a silver bullet for reconciling ethics and economics, morality and the market. This roundtable session highlights current research and practice on training engineers to navigate CSR as a heterogeneous and ethically complex field of practice. The roundtable will feature brief presentations on each topic and then be opened to discussion. Topics range from findings from a five-year research project that infused ethnographic research on CSR into engineering curricula at four different universities, to theories of "relational CSR," to assessments of the professional prospects for "engineers for good" in the corporate job market.