In the United States, we are experiencing continually declining social mobility to the point where the majority of young people today will be economically worse off than their parents, as measured by lifetime earnings.
Meanwhile, we know that parental wealth is more important than interest and skill in determining who becomes an inventor. Children born into the richest 1 percent are 10 times more likely to be inventors than those born into the bottom 50 percent.
Economists estimate that if women, people of color, and children from low-income families became inventors at the same rate as men from high-income families, innovation in the United States would quadruple. And if innovation in the United States quadrupled, driven by the ideas and solutions of our most marginalized communities and citizens, it would fundamentally change the direction across everything from social mobility and racial equity, to economic competitiveness, the environment and even national security. And there is no better vehicle to unlock that potential than making.
Why Making?
The act of making is at the heart of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Maker education uniquely empowers students to explore and improve their world. It enables students to create by building, prototyping, coding, digitally fabricating and experimenting. Maker education puts the student at the center of the learning experience and is interdisciplinary, fusing arts and design with science, technology, engineering and math.
Makers often create new businesses and they can also drive the success of existing ones. Maker education has a central role in supporting the development of a diverse national workforce with an entrepreneurial “maker mindset”. This is essential to the success of communities and industries that are actively innovating and making in the USA.
Why Human Capacity & Talent?
Many colleges and universities are investing in maker education as a vehicle to drive innovation and student career pathways.
In 2015, there were approximately 150 makerspaces on college campuses. Today there are more than 500 spaces. Yet, there is often limited human capacity to support these spaces and even more limited capacity to support the individual students who use them on their own unique career pathway. As an example, a community college may have talented students creating their own designs and developing a “maker mindset”, but limited capacity to provide individualized guidance for those students on ways to connect with local industry and entrepreneurship resources.
If we can overlap maker ecosystems with entrepreneurship ecosystems, with a focus on equity, we can create equitable, innovation ecosystems. Achieving these kinds of ecosystems will require uniquely-supported human talent and capacity, continually learning within a national network of peers.
The MakerUSA model is designed to fill a critical human capacity and talent gap, while having the potential to scale at significant rates.
