Stimulating Innovation(or Making Innovation Meaningful Again)

Welcome to the 21st century—a time when every school system in the world is preparing its children to be successful. As educators who face countless changes and requirements with technology and complexities hurtled our way, we can feel as though we are standing helpless in the middle of that Billy Joel song, We Didn’t Start the Fire—the one with rapid-fire allusions to hundreds of headlines (Joel, 1989). Times are certainly complex, and this complexity, according to Michael Fullan, “means change, but specifically it means rapidly occurring, unpredictable, nonlinear change” (2001, p. ix). Innovation is one brand of change. We cannot innovate without doing things differently. Innovation done well, however, is more controlled than simply doing things differently; oftentimes, it can even be predictable. Innovation is planned change. Researchers from the 1970s describe it as “a deliberate, novel, specific change which is thought to be efficacious in accomplishing the goals of a system” (Nisbet & Collins, 1978, p. 6). According to the implications of that definition, stimulat- ing innovation is as much about systemic change as it is about leadership and culture.