The Era of Young Innovators: Looking Beyond Universities To Source Talents 86
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?"
of course (Score:1)
Re:of course (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re: (Score:1)
yet we're getting plenty of shit ideas due to VCs doing a pump and dump
Superiority and its discontents (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) [wikipedia.org]
""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 Ins
innovation != "innovation!!!1!" (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I'd say about 20 years - there's nothing I can do on my main computer today that I couldn't do on the Acorn ARM-based desktop I bought in 1994. There's not one idea that is implemented now but wasn't implemented then.
With one exception: more space-efficiency. Although these have been cancelled out by so many layers of bloat that RISC OS then feels as snappy as Windows 8 today.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I remember the ARM1 springboard thingy. I got an A3000 around 1990, although that was a bit inadequate - no hard drive, coprocessor slot, etc. But yeah, similar throughout. 26-bit architecture is more elegant than 32-bit, too :P.
Re: (Score:1)
You hit the nail on the head. Nothing has improved, it only got prettied up. It does more, but it's more of the same crap. It's faster, but an emptier experience. It's convenient, but expensive. It does more work, but it has more bugs. Seems like paying the public to perpetually beta test produces the illusion of progress in victims of cranial rectumitis.
Future already here but unevenly distributed (Score:2)
"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 [slashdot.org]
See also:
"The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" by Alan Kay
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007007a_revolution.pdf [vpri.org]
http://archive.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/kay.pdf [cra.org]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg [youtube.com]
good point about food_mod up^ (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
It succinctly describes what unchecked capitalism has done in ways that are difficult to dodge.
FTFY. A large amount of the proceeds of that increased productivity went into the coffers of the minuscule percent and has largely never gone back into the general economy. You don't have to take my word for it; a bit of searching, and many of the better results available directly from such places as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the IRS, will give you a start. Until Bush the Younger the gr
Re: (Score:2)
I acknowledge that you FTFM.
I put consumerism instead of capitalism in order to head off any trolls who have a google alert set for anything that doesn't praise the capitalist economic system.
I agree with your definition of capitalism. It is accurate to common usage and avoid confusion with 'socialism' 'communism' 'fascism' etc.
I'd like to move away from the 'capitalsim/communism' dichotomy because it is actually really reductive.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you.
I don't blame your caution. For the rest, while I'm a simpleton I still try to call it as I see it. Further, like you, I too try to use more useful terms than ones which generate reflexes rather than thought.
Btw, your sig, I found Dave's instructions and essays on CSS and a bunch of other stuff helpful and informative; his glimpse into the workings of W3C are most interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
me too!!!
I came across Dave's page long ago when I was lost in layers of abstraction and pre-standards internet browsers ;)
My dad was a cryptographer in the Navy and he taught me computing first by punch cards...which is kind of like a Rosetta stone for any digital system...it was great...for a time...
Then the "world wide web" came along a
Re: (Score:1)
Oh give me a break! Yes Microsoft stole everything! Want to know what Microsoft did as innovation? They made it possible to print from any app. Sounds trivial, but Microsoft perfected the driver model. Until Windows 3 the concept of the driver model was there, but it was broken or haphazard. I was there when I needed printer drivers for Wordperfect, Lotus 123, etc. These days we assume things just work, and it was Microsoft that perfected this.
Did Microsoft innovate other areas? Yeah, but guess what Apple i
Re: (Score:2)
Haha as if most university students aren't naive and cheap.
Re: (Score:1)
Gold Price Performance USD
Today -7.70 -0.58%
30 Days -80.10 -5.76%
6 Months -241.90 -15.59%
1 Year -484.20 -26.99%
get the computer aided stuff out ASAP (Score:4)
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
Re: (Score:2)
This needs to be communicated to schools where the kids in Calculus are consid
Kids are gonna do what they are borned to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Ask them both to solve the same problem an you'll probably find a wide range of solutions from the former, to brilliant and concise to what the hell are you doing; From the latter, the same tired solution that was considered smart 5 years ago which, while adequate, will not lead to any innovative approaches.
You are aware that the world doesn't need yet another damn sorting algorithm? If people want to innovate, they should do so in an area that hasn't been solved totally. There's lots of those.
This is bound to come up... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This is bound to come up... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
all BS (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Ideas are all around (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The bottleneck is always between idea and implementation. Ideas are cheap and in near infinite supply. Executing ideas successfully and creating a successful business from those ideas - that is always the hard part.
The onus is not on others to explain why they don't want to build your idea; the onus is on you to convince them as to why they should.
Maybe you haven't effectively communicated a compelling value proposition for why someone would want to adopt your technology over other proven methods. Maybe it
Re: (Score:2)
Bad idea. The person who is good with business and people will use his skills to take nearly all the money and all the credit. That's just the way they're wired. If you think otherwise about a particular business person, remember the fable of the scorpion and the frog.
Re: (Score:2)
Bad idea. The person who is good with business and people will use his skills to take nearly all the money and all the credit. That's just the way they're wired. If you think otherwise about a particular business person, remember the fable of the scorpion and the frog.
But if you don't partner up or learn how to do those parts yourself, you still won't succeed. Business skills and people skills are necessary to taking an idea and turning it into a proper money-spinner. But then, as was said earlier, ideas are cheap; the value is virtually entirely in the execution. In particular, you have to be able to delegate (no one person can do it all except in the smallest of businesses; there's just not enough time) and there's a great many specialist areas: finance, project manage
Re: (Score:2)
That's right. So, if you have an idea, and can't manage to do the business and people stuff yourself, the best thing to do is just sit on it. Why let a douchebag get rich off your idea while you get shut out?
The business people use this sentiment to justify what they do. To which I say they can come up with the damn
Re: (Score:1)
This would be before one has solid data models. You could "create" a field or table just by saving to it. Over time you could lock it down, incrementally adding constraints as the project matures.
And it's far more flexible than an OODBMS.
Re: (Score:1)
My idea would more closely resemble existing RDBMS, at least for querying purposes, making it easier for query writers to pick it up. Mongo has a Lisp-like query language.
Re: (Score:1)
The dynamic idea is a lot closer to existing RDBMS than the current crop of NoSql databases. We have static application languages and dynamic languages for different purposes and niches, so it makes sense to have static RDBMS and dynamic RDBMS for similar reasons. That's pretty much what guided my design drafts.
We would have to give up some things in exchange for other benefits*, for sure, but it's part of the fundamental static-versus-dynamic tradeoff set. I believe there are legitimate niches and times f
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't a flame...but try implementing your idea in an easy mode language like Python (or any highly expressive language). Your time investment won't be large - and if it works...perfect! Then you have a proof of concept and you can refine it to death, and then port it to a compiled language.
You could host it on a visible site like github, sourceforge, or savannah to try and attract folks to help you if you are short on time as well. Time is probably the biggest barrier I have to implementing new softwar
Desparation (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you look at the addresses, that is in Canada (Ontario = ON, Nova Scotia = NS)
Science fairs are better (Score:3)
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.
yes! (Score:1)
Need to have more of the apprenticeship system (Score:2)
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.
Not so special (Score:1)
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 capa
Then there's the prodigy problem (Score:1)
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.
Yesterday's teen genius is tomorrow's univ. genius (Score:2)
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
Throw money at the problem (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)