Innovation

Great ideas come from diverse minds, and efforts to get more African Americans into cutting edge fields — science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine — are gaining ground, but with considerable challenges. How might efforts to increase this kind of diversity fare under a Trump presidency and beyond? Host Mary Kay Magistad explores.

The Maker Movement started to reconnect Americans with the creativity and joy that comes from making things with your hands, after years of outsourcing manufacturing jobs. It’s now been embraced by dozens of countries, including China. And in China, factory of the world for decades, what does the Maker Movement mean? Depends whether you’re a Maker, or a government official — and therein lies the rub.

Join us for a shameless celebration of America’s brightest and best. In 2016, The Takeaway led a search for America’s greatest innovation. In this special podcast, we introduce you the nation’s top ten innovations, each with own champion, as well a range of interviews the we aired along the way in our search for America’s Greatest Innovation. This series was produced with research assistance from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Lemelson Foundation. 

May 12. 2016: 

1. In Africa, a Celebration of Growth and Entrepreneurship (11 min)

2. Brazilian Senate Moves to Impeach President Dilma Rousseff (4 min)

3. Hillary Clinton Promises to Share Government Info on U.F.O.s (4 min)

4. Gaming App Helps Researchers Fight Dementia (7 min)

5. Inside a Massive Database of Dreams (7 min)

Heads up, Silicon Valley, Bangalore’s not just for outsourcing anymore. It’s rising fast as a world-class hub of tech and biotech innovation, pulling successful Indian entrepreneurs back from Silicon Valley, and from around India. It’s part of the story of how the other Asian giant, India, with half its population under age 25, is just getting going in seeing what it can do in this century.

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

As part of our ongoing search for America’s greatest innovation, we’re figuring out which qualities make the United States such an effective incubator for creative ideas.

Alec Ross used to be senior adviser on innovation for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. It was a brand new position designed to find out-of-the-box solutions to the world’s problems. His new book, “Industries of the Future,” is all about the changing global economy and where we as a country fit into it.

According to Ross, America’s innovative spirit can be traced all the way back to our ancestors.

Vote For America’s Greatest Innovation Here

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

If you had to come up with a list of American inventors, it would probably include people like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs. In other words, it would include a lot of very impressive thinkers who were conveniently born with the advantage of being white.

But throughout our nation’s history, people of color have come up with tons of revolutionary ideas and inventions that transformed our economy and the way we live.

Keith Holmes, author of “Black Inventors, Crafting of 200 years of Success,” has spent years cataloging the accomplishments of these men and women, including Garrett A. Morgan, inventor of the 3-way traffic signal and a special mask that helps firefighters breath oxygen in burning buildings.

Morgan started at the bottom of the economic ladder—his parents were slaves. But according to his granddaughter, Sandra Morgan, that didn’t stop him from persistently trying to solve big problems in his community and beyond.

Here, Holmes and Morgan discuss the problem-solving prowess of America’s greatest Black innovators. 

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

In 2011, President Obama signed the America Invents Act, a law that overhauled the patent system and opened four new patent offices.

Hope Shimabuku directs one of them: The Texas Regional United States Patent and Trademark Office. She tells The Takeaway that the new law speeds the invention timetable, from the first brainstorm to a finished, patented product.

“A lot of people are starting to understand the value of patents and how important a role [they] play in innovation, and driving innovation,” she says.

Click on the audio player above to hear this segment.

It’s the second to last day in our search for America’s Greatest Innovation, and there are only three items left on our list: The mobile phone, the sewing machine, and our listener-selected wildcard pick, the transistor. 

Many of you were eager to point out that several of the innovations we’ve discussed wouldn’t even exist without the transistor. Well guess who agrees with you? Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine.

In our final pitch for the series, he argues for why the transistor is America’s greatest innovation. Click on the audio player above to hear Kelly.

 Vote For America’s Greatest Innovation Today!

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

Black women own 1.5 million businesses and represent the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S. Their companies generate about $44 billion a year.

Yet, despite those stats, black women received only 0.2 percent of all venture funding in the past five years.

“You can totally overlook how to monetize this really amazing market because you’re not paying attention to who’s there, and you’re not hiring the folks who look like your customers,” says Kathryn Finney, an entrepreneur who started the blog Budget Fashionista and sold it for a healthy profit.

Finney says that venture capitalists and Silicon Valley executives tend to only invest in people who look like they do—and they don’t look like her.

“I actually had a [venture capitalist] tell me that he didn’t do the black woman thing,” she says. “Several years ago I was part of one of the first incubator programs here in New York. It was a horrible experience for me. It was the first time in my life, growing up as an over-achiever who just happened to be a young black woman, it was the first time in my life where people had no expectations of me whatsoever. It was really difficult for me to operate in that space.”

Finney brought a creative idea to the start-up incubator—a beauty company that functioned as a kind of “Birchbox for black women,” she says. The reason? After doing some research, she learned that black women purchase more than 30 percent of all hair care products in the United States.

“It’s over a $10 billion industry ripe for disruption,” she says. “I came and I was so excited. The response I received was just absolutely absurd.”

One venture capitalist said that he didn’t want to invest in a project focused on black women, while another argued that Finney was unqualified to run such a business.

“I had another [venture capitalist] tell me that I wouldn’t be able to relate to other black woman because I had an accountant, and he didn’t think that other black women had accountants,” she says. “It was stunning. But it was that sort of attitude, that sort of resistance to that market where it wasn’t about money, because there was obviously tons of money to be made. It became more about culture, it became more about identity, and it became more about color.”

Finney is tackling this issue head on. She’s currently the founder and managing director of digitalundivided, a social enterprise that finds, supports, and trains urban tech entrepreneurs. She says it’s time to rethink the problem of diversity in the start-up industry.

“As someone who has built a tech company and has been in this space for a while, I do understand the challenges on the other end of it,” she says. “There is a lot of pressure on start-ups to scale rapidly, and so many would argue that, because it’s moving so rapidly, I have to hire and bring in people that look like me and who identify with me. The problem is, you may not be your customer, and you may not be your market.”

In order to find solutions to this problem, Finney and digitalundivided have been exploring and studying the state of black women in tech entrepreneurship in the United States, and searching for practical solutions.

“The best way to convince people is with success, and that’s on both sides—externally and internally to the community,” she says. “One of the things that we have done is really focus on bringing people who have been a success into our communities, rather than trying to take our communities and bring them to some other place.”

In connection with the United Negro College Fund and Spe…