Newsmakers

Essentials of innovation

By Robert Preer

Eugene Fitzgerald, Johnson visiting professor of marketing and MIT professor of materials engineering, and Andreas Wankerl, operations director at Cornell’s Innovation Interface, co-authors of a book on the importance of innovation, penned a timely op/ ed for Forbes in response to a call for innovation by President Obama in his State of the Union address on Jan. 25. In their piece, “Why the government needs to invest in innovation” (Jan. 31), Fitzgerald and Wankerl wrote about the essential path that America must take to get back to an innovation economy. Their book, co-authored with Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, is titled Inside Real Innovation: How the right approach can move ideas from R&D to market and get the economy moving (World Scientific Publishing, November 2010).