Innovation and the economy

I know it has been forever since I posted–more on that later this week, I hope, but the short version is it has been a busy summer with a new version of Urban Science up and running, a new game in development, several grants in the works, and so on. But as I say, more about that soon, I hope.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t resist posting a link to these pieces from the Economist last month. The first has a wonderful summary of why innovation is so important–and why the value of innovation represents a fundamental underlying economic shift:

Governments have good reason to foster innovation, for it is the mainspring of economic growth. Developing countries can grow quickly by investing heavily in new plant and equipment. But rich nations have already built up big capital stocks. If they are to sustain growth in the years ahead, they must be economic pioneers, pushing out the technological frontier through advances in knowledge.

The second argues that current measures of national productivity don’t do a good job of measuring this most important asset in a post-industrial economy:

ONE of the main snags in assessing innovation’s impact on the economy is that official statistics trail behind the pioneers. The national accounts are good at measuring capital spending on things such as plant and equipment that matter in an industrial economy. They are not up to speed in incorporating investment in intangible activities such as R&D.

In other words, it isn’t just that we don’t currently teach innovation, and that our tests don’t assess innovation–we don’t even measure it appropriately in the economy at large.

This question of assessment–which I talk about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn–is a critical one. If we can’t measure whether people know, have learned, or are using ways of thinking that really matter, how can we expect to teach what really matters?

I just finished a piece on this very question for a forthcoming handbook of games and education (link to follow), but it is a topic that I hope to return to in more depth in the coming weeks. But as I say in this new paper:

Without assessments that are aligned with the key skills, knowledge, attitudes, and ways of thinking that young people need in the digital age of global competition, there is no way to realistically evaluate either the current educational system or any viable alternative educational intervention, including computer games. Education lacks a reliable method for determining whether individuals have the abilities, understandings, inclinations, and habits of mind they need for success in the modern society and in the modern economy: Unless we develop such assessments, we can do little more than get better and better at preparing students for a world that no longer exists.