The Innovation Competencies - Implications for Educating the Engineer of the Future.

Innovation is rapidly emerging as a critical competency for all types of organizations to ensure future success and prosperity. It is often included among the top strategic priorities for corporate leaders. This increased attention continues a trend of the last several years that highlights the importance of innovation as an organizational priority and suggests that engineering graduates must be prepared as skilled innovators in order to be successful in the technical workplace of today and the future. This paper presents ideas, models, and new directions in engineering education. The paper proposes the types of educational processes envisioned to most appropriate to instilling the innovation competencies in engineering graduates. It is proposed that the innovation competencies are best taught and learned through a new and rebalanced combination of the teaching of content and an expanded concept of experiences. Characteristics and examples of these expanded experiences are presented using modeling concepts from the field of systems engineering where experiences are represented as learner interactions. These proposed experiences must be carefully crafted to be team based, focus on exploration and experimentation, and include interaction among multiple entities including a practice innovation system. These concepts have implications for both educators and business leaders in developing innovation competencies in both graduates and engineering professionals. Instead of differentiating between experiences in school versus professional practice, the educational system described here extends from school days into professional practice, serving practicing professionals as well as students. This paper relies upon models of three distinct types of systems to provide an enhanced environment for education about and practice of the Innovation Competencies. The first of these are the Targeted Systems: the real, laboratory, or practice systems subject to innovation by learning students or practicing engineers, modeled by them as a central part of the Innovation Competencies. The second is the System of Education (itself a target of innovation), a model of which is summarized in this paper as a configurable reference model to illustrate the implied changes and advancements in different situations. The third is the System of Innovation, a model of which is referenced to understand the underlying framework in which all innovation occurs (effective or not; human-performed or not). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]