Improvisation For Engineering Innovation

Enhanced creativity among U.S. engineers and scientists is required in the face of strategic needs for innovation in numerous technical areas including: energy, the environment and health. NSF’s third generation Engineering Research Centers explicitly require an educational component to enhance creativity to improve innovation. We have applied an approach to improving creativity that has traditionally not been used in technical innovation. The approach uses improvisational humor exercises to generate innovative ideas. The equivalence of humor and innovation is well established, and recently Sweeney and co-workers have systematically applied improvisation to enhance innovation. While this approach has been successful in non-technical fields, such as business and marketing, success has been limited in technical fields such as engineering. We have suggested a protocol based on a combination of humorous improvisation and stochastic molecular simulation to effectively search technical idea space. Humorous improvisation is the random idea generator for a stochastic search algorithm in innovation space; just as random number generators are used to sample molecular conformation space. We hypothesize that a more comprehensive refinement of idea space is required to make this approach effective for technical innovation. We have made some preliminary investigations of this protocol by carrying out workshops with undergraduate engineering design students. These preliminary results have suggested a basic protocol that uses a two-stage process: an improvised random idea which then inspires a technical problem solution. This two step approach is not used in Sweeney’s approach, and may be responsible for its lack of effectiveness in technical areas, such as engineering.