All Innovation Is Innovation of Systems: An Integrated 3-D Model of Innovation Competencies

The development of the future generations of innovators is of central interest to engineering educators. What are the competencies of innovation and how do we develop them? There is a considerable body of scholarly, business, and popular literature concerned with the characteristics of innovative people and organizations, in which attention is frequently focused on individual creativity and other personality traits, organizational cultures, and other nontechnical capabilities. We argue here that the typical descriptions of innovation competencies are correct but incomplete, lacking critical dimensions that are essential for planning an educational curriculum and assessing progress within it. The foundation of our model of innovation competencies rests on our definition of innovation: The ability to develop novel solutions to problems that result in significantly enhanced stakeholder satisfaction. As engineering educators, we believe that innovation is only effective when it includes the full cycle leading to delivery of improved stakeholder outcomes, and this introduces challenges beyond an initial creative mental leap. We accept that (1) certain discipline-specific technical competencies traditionally addressed by engineering educational programs can be important to innovation, and (2) we likewise accept that a collection of nontechnical traits are also vital to successful innovators. However, in this paper we argue that the combination of (1) discipline-specific technical skills and (2) non-technical competencies is missing an entire dimension. This third dimension is a technical one, but not specific to a discipline: it is the set of systems competencies. The resulting three-dimensional model provides an integrated view of the competencies of innovation, against which educators can plan, educate, and measure accomplishment. By separating but coupling the three dimensions of this model, we have a tool spanning different engineering programs, providing an integrating framework for conversation across our specialties. We have identified assessment indicators used in demonstrating the attainment of these competencies. A novel aspect of these demonstrations along the systems dimension is their explicit use of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) artifacts. The emergence of MBSE methods has a transformative impact on not only performance of systemic aspects of engineering, but also education in these methods. MBSE transforms “bag of tricks” and “body of knowledge” engineering requiring decades to learn into scientifically-based systemic skills that can be learned and explicitly demonstrated by undergraduates. This paper is based upon work carried out by a summer institute on innovation, building on historical work on institutional learning outcomes, industrial systems engineering methodology, and global research in characteristics of innovators. As a part of our institution’s emphasis on P ge 22154.2 innovation, we are now piloting the related methods in specific disciplines, two of which are illustrated in the paper. Introduction Innovation has become an increasingly important concept to corporate, academic, and public organizations and as a measure of national competitiveness . In a survey of companies and business executives, it is reported that 72% of them rank innovation as a ‘top three’ strategic priority. Therefore it has become essential to Engineering Educational programs to ensure that their graduates enter the workforce with skills that will allow them to be effective innovators and to be able to function well in innovative organizations. We have two main goals for this document. The first is to help define the set of program level competencies that are essential for a student to be prepared to enter the modern innovative environment. The second goal is to provide some tools to help illustrate ways in which innovation education can be implemented by giving examples of in-class activities that can help students develop innovation skills, and by defining a set of program-level objectives to help programs assess innovation education within their curricula. While our discussion and our examples largely center on instilling innovation skills in Engineering majors, any technical undergraduate program, including Engineering, Mathematics, and the Sciences, should be able to provide the appropriate skills within their curricula. While it is clear that successful innovative teams need to have strong innovation competencies as a group, we feel that it is also important for an individual working on an innovation team to have a working knowledge of all of these competencies as well. It is in this light that we feel it is up to educational programs to ensure that all students develop competence in these areas. A definition of innovation An examination of the literature shows that there are many different definitions of innovation. Most of these definitions center on aspects of innovative thought, including creative problem solving and creating an environment that fosters innovation. It is important to note that technical educational programs not only should instill the ability to creatively solve problems (which we would call invention), but also the ability take these novel ideas and incorporate them into realworld solutions that result in an improvement over the status quo, as experienced by stakeholders. Based on this reasoning, for the purposes of this document, innovation is defined as the ability to develop novel solutions to problems that result in significantly enhanced stakeholder satisfaction.