Book Event with Matt Wisnioski: Beyond the Buzzword, a Critical History of “Innovation”

The consensus that innovation drives American progress has cracked. For over half a century innovation served as a universal good. While the imperative to innovate for a better future continues to fuel systemic change around the world, critics now assail innovation culture as an engine of inequality or accuse its do-gooders of woke groupthink. What happened? 

Please RSVP at this link to attend.

In this book talk, the historian Matt Wisnioski investigates how innovation—a once obscure academic term—became ingrained in our institutions, our education, and our beliefs about ourselves. He reveals the central role of a new class of experts in spreading toolkits and mindsets from the cornfields of 1940s Iowa to Silicon Valley tech giants today. This group posited that “innovators” were society’s most important change agents and remade the nation in their image. The innovation culture they built transcended partisan divisions and made strange bedfellows. Wisnioski will discuss how Kennedy-era policymakers inspired President Nixon’s dream of a Nobel Prize for innovators, how anti-military professors built the first university incubators for entrepreneurs, how radical feminists became millionaire consultants, how demands for a rust belt manufacturing renaissance inspired theories of a global creative class, how philanthropic encouraged girls and minority children to pursue innovative lives, and why the innovation consensus is now in dispute.

Wisnioski will be joined in conversation by Stanford's Elizabeth Kessler, an advanced lecturer in the American Studies program who frequently offers courses on the history of Silicon Valley.

Matthew Wisnioski is an interdisciplinary historian of innovation, engineering, science education, and the nexus of science, engineering, art, and design (SEAD). He teaches at Virginia Tech University, where he serves as professor and director of graduate studies in Science, Technology, and Society. He also hols affiliated appointments in History and Engineering Education. He is the author of Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life and Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America, and co-editor with Eric S. Hintz and Marie Stettler Kleine of Does America Need More Innovators? He is writing a new book on The Magic School Bus and the history of science education. His public writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, IEEE Spectrum, Medium, Science, and the Washington Post.

Elizabeth Kessler is an Advanced Lecturer in the American Studies program at Stanford. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century American visual culture. Her diverse interests include: the role of aesthetics, visual culture, and media in modern and contemporary science, especially astronomy; the interchange between technology and ways of seeing and representing; the history of photography; and the representation of fashion in different media. Her first book, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, on the aesthetics of deep space images, was published in 2012. She’s currently writing on book on extraterrestrial time capsules, as well as developing a new project on fashion photography.