Integrating Innovation Curriculum: Measuring Student Innovation to Assess Course and Program Effectiveness

The USA is falling behind other nations in innovation, creating serious threat to the health, stability, and influence of our country. Industry is desperate to hire engineers able to innovate, and universities are developing programs to instill the innovative mindset required to improve global competitiveness [1]. Innovation requires collaboration between engineering, business, and creativity to realistically prepare students to be innovators. Researchers at the University of Arkansas's College of Engineering and Sam M. Walton College of Business collaborate to understand major challenges of introducing and integrating innovation into engineering curriculum and pedagogy. They are researching topics, approaches, and specific learning environments that result in student proficiency. Innovativeness is multifaceted and unfolds over time. Assessing the current and evolving environment and ecosystem (courses and programs) allows researchers to understand what factors cause or affect improvements. This could significantly improve the development and practice of the innovative mindset in students and provide basic insights into developing effective teaching strategies and training methods to cultivate innovative faculty. Based on theoretical grounding, the researchers compiled a comprehensive set of measures designed to quantify student participants’ individual differences in innovative capacity and behavior. Drawing from seminal works on creativity and contemporary innovation inventories, the intent of the survey is to capture preand post-intervention levels of student innovation. In concert with quantitative measures that have demonstrated good validity and reliability, the survey includes qualitative measures aimed at understanding students’ idiosyncratic conceptualization of innovation, and its relationship to their career aspirations. The survey was administered to undergraduate students. Three potential innovation styles (as an outcome, a process, and a mindset) are tested before and after program intervention and compared with the control group. Baseline survey results of are presented in the paper. Data collection will continue in late Spring 2020, and the data will be analyzed and presented at the conference. The intention for this study is twofold: 1) investigation of potential program impacts on students’ innovative capacity and behavior, and 2) evaluation of the associations between students’ perceived innovation and academic performance and the differences between groups. This paper presents the need for developing engineering innovators, literature supporting the survey developed, information on the survey, results, and analyses.