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Why We Need to Foster Innovation

By Phoenix M. Wang

This fall at NBC's Education Nation summit in New York, a pair of young entrepreneurs from Southern California competed in the Innovation Challenge with Truant Today , a new text-messaging service that informs parents of students' attendance records in real time. They didn't win the competition, but they might as well have. The audience gasped in wonder when Tom Brokaw revealed that they were still in high school. When the two teenagers were asked why they founded the company, the pair simply shrugged and said, "It's a problem, and we know how to solve it."

And consider these examples from elsewhere in the country: Two sophomores from the University of Texas at Austin realized that their friends were mostly using Facebook to ask each other homework questions, so they launched a more efficient study-group service this summer called Hoot.me . Frustrated by his school's professional-development options, a Teach For America alumnus in St. Louis built Edthena , a video-based professional-learning platform. In Indianapolis, a 20-something entrepreneur wanted to know if he could persuade his sister to become an active reader, so he created Pocket Tales , a social-reading game platform for which he recently won Houghton Mifflin...