Why does America Prize Creativity and Invention?

The Smithsonian published an article** with the above heading on November 12, 2015. Each of six American ingenuity experts were asked: “What are the aspects of U.S. culture that encourage us to prize innovation?” Each has ideas as to why we do – forgiveness of failure; tolerance of risk and an appetite for apparently off-the-wall ideas; the notion of the frontier and the individual pioneer; a permissive government stance on creativity and entrepreneurship; innovation terrain, willingness to take risks contribute to the innovation terrain, and political leadership to encourage risk and innovation; a myth of political and social innovation inspired by an “empty continent” waiting to be exploited and developed; prizing individual-based achievement growing from individual freedom and struggle against oppression; and finally, waves of immigration bringing different peoples and ideas together creating a cross-pollination unlike any other culture or society in the world.

Here are the folks who responded to the challenge:

• John Kao: Tolerance of risk and failure
• Yael Borofsky: The government
• Linda Weiss: National security
• Ron Unz: A frontier mentality
• Shamim M. Momin: Ideals of success arising from individual freedom and struggle against oppresion.
• Arthur Daemmrich: History – waves of immigration

When I read these brief statements I was struck by the surnames and the origins they suggest – Kao, Borofsky, Weiss, Unz, Momin, Daemmrich. Our culture is a hybrid, born of a mingling of cultural traits and peoples from the entire globe. The mingling is free and produces an amalgam of traits, of different ways of thinking and looking at people, ideas and things. The United States is blessed with a hybrid culture as evidenced in this short list of thinkers.

Our ancestors (both indigenous and immigrant) occupy an enormous and “empty” continent. Unique challenges were at hand in every moment of living, Solutions had to be created on the fly from locally available resources (human and material). Immigrants faced situations where they had to draw upon their own inner strengths to solve problems. In turn they learned to rely upon their community to create and build. Need a barn? The community comes together in a “barn raising.” Need a road or a ferry? Individuals stepped up to clear the way and to cross the water. There was no dependence upon a higher authority because none often existed, officials were not present to govern and control. The small social group had to act to create the structure and infrastructure for themselves and often from scratch. Individuals led the way into the wilderness, others joined to form these free groups and change the wilderness.

Hundreds of years later, I was part of such a group in a small way when teaching at the University of Colorado at Denver. In my early collegiate education I had learned from laboratory experience, the hands on demonstration of the principles of chemistry, physics and biology. Now as a sociologist I wanted to give that kind of learning experience to my beginning students. How to do it?

I drifted toward computers, thinking of a new way to deliver educational material and the laboratory experience to my students. I did not ask permission to teach a class using computers and the network. I simply worked out the details, put the structure together on the campus computer and asked a few students to join in the adventure. After a few years and the increasing presence of networked “personal computers” I moved to a from the main frame computer to a system that was pretty much free of official oversight – a small computer in my office connected through the campus network to the outside world. With the participation of students in the process the students and I created one of the first on-line classes. Later we would find ourselves hemmed in by rules and restrictions, but at this point we could explore and try out techniques and structure. We took risks – a single small computer accessed over the network/internet with no back up. As was inevitable the hard-drive on my computer crashed on the first examination day. We were able to recover the information and get the computer operational and the examination completed. We never looked back.

As with many innovations and inventions, this class (and a couple of others) were discovered by the administration and incorporated into a larger, formal set of offerings. Freedom to experiment and try different things continued to exist and we did experiment within now loosely defined limits and structure. Eventually everything was farmed out to an off-campus entity to build the infrastructure (delivery system, storage, interlinks among registration, grading, recording, tests and testing, and so forth). Now we had a business to take care of the nuts and bolts, we created cooperatives on campus that would help with the “barn-raising” necessary to get a new class off the ground and going. Those of us who had gone before became the mentors for new folk coming into this new experience.

The massive open online courses (MOOC) have grown from these early pioneering innovations in education. All made possible by the freedom of the internet, the permissiveness in the academy (early on) and by the risk taking of teachers willing to try new approaches to education while maintaining the standards of excellence they had imbibed in their training.

In the final analysis Americans prize creativity and innovation as something any of us can do. We are individuals who have grown in an ethos that encourages and supports creativity and invention. We know people of different cultural backgrounds so are aware that the future is not set, ideas are not absolute. Ideas and creativity are freed and we are free to bring new ideas, things into being. We dream of going on our own, of creating the next SuperCalc, rocket ship, electric car or silly putty. Some dreams are large, some small. Many of us have these dreams. A few are willing to step out and put the dream to the test, to make them real.

** Read more at Smithsonian: Why does America Prize Creativity and Invention