Every American an Innovator

A landmark cultural history that reveals how the relentless pursuit of innovation has transformed our society, our institutions, and our inner selves.

For half a century, innovation served as a universal good in an age of fracture. That consensus is cracking. 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? Drawing on a decade of research, Every American an Innovator by Matthew Wisnioski investigates how innovation—a once obscure academic term—became ingrained in our institutions, our education, and our beliefs about ourselves.

Wisnioski argues that innovation culture did not spring from the digital revolution, nor can it be boiled down to heroic entrepreneurs or villainous capitalists. Instead, 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 of engineers, philosophers, bureaucrats, and business leaders 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 shows 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 programs that encouraged girls and minority children to pursue innovative lives changed the nature of childhood play, and why the innovation consensus is now in dispute.Series Foreword
Preface
1 Make Things Better
Part I: Seedlings and Incubators
2 When Innovation Was New
3 A Nation of Innovators
4 Be an Innovation Millionaire!
5 Incubating Entrepreneurs
Part II: Deficits and Dreams
6 Creative Class Consciousness
7 Empower Everything
8 Lifelong Kindergarten
Part III: Self Reckoning
9 Innovators on Trial
10 Expert Lessons
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index“Matthew Wisnioski’s new book Every American an Innovator explains how innovation became not merely a corporate buzzword but the 'natural expression of the spirit of our time.’"
—Los Angeles Review of Books“Wisnioski thoughtfully reveals what it means for society’s past, present, and future to understand humanity’s relationship with technology through the opaque lens of innovation.”
—Rayvon Fouché, Professor, Communication Studies and Journalism, Northwestern University

“In this beautifully written book, Wisnioski expertly shows that the widespread embrace of innovation as a framework for collective imagination is also a story about the making of American subjects—from 'innovation experts' creating new fields of research to scientists, schoolchildren, and members of minority groups reimagined as innovators.”
—Brice Laurent, Senior Researcher, Mines Paris; author of European ObjectsMatthew Wisnioski is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America and coeditor of Does America Need More Innovators? (both MIT Press).