Innovation is the central driver of economic growth. Many growth models underscore the importance of actively directing more individuals to innovation (Romer, 1990; Jones, 2022). This goal can be achieved by providing early exposure to innovation to children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Bell et al., 2019; Akcigit et al., 2020; Bloom et al., 2019). But despite the consensus in the literature, there exists a noticeable absence of systematic interventions that teach innovation in school settings. The ability for innovation, i.e., generating valuable ideas for society, applies across diverse disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities, and can equip children to drive innovation in their future careers. However, a formidable challenge lies in finding education programs that can systematically nurture and harness children's ability for innovation. Especially in developing countries settings where schools often focus on memorization and tests, it is challenging to introduce, let alone lead, successful programs for innovation or other higher-order skills (Glewwe and Muralidharan, 2016; Glewwe et al., 2020). This study investigates the effects of an innovation education program for high school students, a collaboration between a state government and a non-profit organization in a resource-constrained rural Indian setting. Using a randomized evaluation, I evaluate the program's effects mainly on the ability for innovation but also on academic achievements, cognitive ability, and personality traits. This program addresses a significant disparity in innovation opportunities by targeting India's marginalized communities, particularly socially and economically isolated students. The majority of individuals who are able to pursue innovation predominantly emerge from the world's most affluent communities (Bell et al., 2019; Aghion et al., 2017). In contrast, this initiative uniquely prioritizes marginalized groups recognized in the Indian Constitution to address historical social and economic disadvantages. Scheduled Castes, often called Dalits, comprise marginalized communities that have endured discrimination and exploitation over centuries, while Scheduled Tribes, known as Adivasis, are indigenous or tribal groups with unique cultural identities. These communities still face discrimination, significantly affecting their access to education, employment opportunities, income levels, and public resources (Piketty, 2020; Munshi, 2019). Social welfare and tribal welfare schools, operating with limited resources, primarily serve students in remote and underserved areas. Policymakers aim to empower disadvantaged children attending these schools through this program, equipping them with the innovation skills that can improve their personal and societal prospects. The curriculum is designed for students to create innovations that address the problems they identify in their surroundings. A team of engineers-turned-educators with experience in teaching, especially in low-income settings, created a new curriculum for secondary school students developed after Stanford's design thinking methodology (Simon, 1980; Kelley and Kelley, 2013). This adapted program has been implemented in collaboration with five Indian state governments and the central governments of two other developing nations. The program intentionally incorporates self-directed learning pedagogy and provides adequate resources to students to ensure sustainability even in the most resource-constrained schools. Students work independently in teams, progressing through five stages of developing their frugal innovations: identifying a problem, conducting research, ideating solutions, creating prototypes, and presenting to peers and intended users for feedback. The ability for innovation is challenging to measure due to its context-dependent nature. I use two different approaches for measuring it in children. The first measures the ability for finding a valuable solution by using strategic exploration in a lab-in-the-field game, while the second assesses the quality of frugal innovations created by the students. The first measure of innovation, a lab-in-the-field game adapted from a widely cited paper in experimental economics by Ederer and Manso (2013), incentivizes exploration and measures the ability to discover optimal solutions. It is built on the concept of innovation as a result of knowledge generation through experimentation, rewarding the exploration of new untested approaches that lead to innovation rather than the exploitation of well-known ones (Arrow, 1969; Weitzman, 1979; March, 1991). The game is designed in a way that higher profits can only be achieved by being exploratory aimed at discovering new solutions, as opposed to relying solely on exploiting existing ones. The second measure of innovation, a new scale called Innovation-S, evaluates the quality of frugal innovations and was developed with input from experienced inventors, with its predictive validity established through the success of their innovations. I developed this scale with input from 58 scientists, high-impact patent recipients, and founders of both for-profit and social enterprises. I report four key results. First, the intervention improved students' ability to innovate in finding better solutions. In the innovation lab-in-the-field game, treated students demonstrated increased effort by 0.13 standard deviation. They are strategically more exploratory of discovering new solutions by 0.09 standard deviations (as opposed to being exploitative of an existing solution) and perform better in fine-tuning their exploration by 0.18 standard deviations. Second, treated students created real-world ideas that are more innovative. Over the academic year, both treatment and comparison teams submitted 2413 ideas, which were evaluated by a group of experienced innovators. I find that the treated teams scored 0.20 standard deviations higher on this new scale relative to the comparison teams. Third, I find that math scores decline, potentially indicating a trade-off of academic outcomes with the ability for innovation. Treated students performed 0.13 standard deviations worse than their peers in the comparison group, even when comparing their scores on ten identical questions that were common between the baseline and the endline assessments. This decline in scores in identical questions suggests that the students might have been less interested in answering math questions at the endline assessment. This observation is further supported by the students' self-reported decrease in enthusiasm for learning math by 0.30 standard deviations compared to the comparison group. Finally, the program had negative effective on student enthusiasm for almost all the other academic subjects, with no impact on their science performance, IQ scores, or personality traits. Students reported decreased enthusiasm, ranging from 0.11 to 0.21 standard deviations, across all the other academic subjects except science.