Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal and Innosight Institute Host Forum on Educational Innovation

By:

May 9, 2010

PHILADELPHIA, May 6 /PRNewswire/ — On May 11, in conjunction with its Spring edition launch, the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal will bring educational innovators from the Greater Philadelphia area to discuss quality education within our region. The goals of the forum, entitled “Disrupting Class: What Our Education System Will Look Like When Transformation is Complete,” are to discuss disruptive innovation and to create a common vision among private and public stakeholders in education. Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal, co-founded by volunteers Nicholas Torres and Tine Hansen-Turton, is partnering with Innosight Institute, The Philadelphia Great Schools Project, Project U-TURN, and the William Penn Foundation to present the event.

“Disrupting Class,” the inaugural forum of Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal Education Innovation, will convene at the Union League from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. In additional to local innovators, the Journal is pleased to welcome keynote speakers Clayton Christensen of Harvard University and Michael Horn of Innosight Institute, two of the world’s foremost experts on innovation. In 2008, the two collaborated on a book entitled Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

“The education community owes it to our children to find the best solutions for the changing needs of American students,” said Torres. “The goal of this forum is to come together and develop those solutions instead of waiting for the government to fix our broken education system.”

Disruptive innovation, a term coined by Christensen, refers to innovations that transform fields by introducing products and services that are simpler, more convenient and accessible, and lower cost. Attendees of the forum will deliberate on ways to use this type of innovation to improve education.

“The very nature of disruptive innovation is to inject a new product or concept into the market and completely change the norm, while lowering the price for consumers,” said Christensen. “The same way cell phones revolutionized the way people communicate or personal computers transformed the world by bringing affordable computing to people’s desktops — that’s what we hope to do for education.”

Michael Horn, also an expert in innovation, believes that the societal stakes in improving our educational system are too high to ignore. “The landscape of education in America is changing,” he said. “If we don’t consider all of the alternatives to traditional schooling and find the most successful fit, we will fail our children.”

Inspired by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, which also is a sponsor of the Journal, Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal pioneers a new avenue to bring attention to the current and ongoing innovative work in the social-sector community of Greater Philadelphia. It provides a forum for the region’s top social innovators-those who have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to recognize social problems and apply entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage high-impact social change locally, regionally and beyond. Writers for the Journal include professors and students from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and its Fels Institute of Government and School of Social Policy and Practice, LaSalle University and Drexel University School of Public Health. Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal is published quarterly at http://www.philasocialinnovations.org.

SOURCE Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal

Published May. 6, 2010
Copyright © 2010 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently serves as Chairman of the Clayton Christensen Institute and works as a senior strategist at Guild Education.