Going beyond "What should we do?": An approach to implementation of innovation and entrepreneurship in the curriculum

Abstract

In the engineering disciplines, "agile" approaches are most often associated with product development, particularly in the software arena. The approach is most useful for addressing challenges that are complex, require many people, and in which there is a high degree of uncertainty about the best approach.1 This set of conditions holds true far beyond product development. One such scenario is that of planning and implementation of organizational interventions - an environment in which "strategic planning" is often the tool of choice but one which is ineffective in a networked (rather than hierarchical) context. An alternative approach described in this paper is "strategic doing". As in agile product development, the approach uses iterative cycles of implementation, learning and reflection, and improvement, with a focus on rapid experimentation and gradual scaling up of solutions. While not designed for educational settings, the use of strategic doing in such environments is growing. Some recent examples include deployment at individual universities seeking to reform their curriculum, as a technique for students to better organize teams in classes like capstone design, the transformation of academic departments, and the formation of cross-disciplinary research teams to address "grand challenges." This paper describes the process and its application to engineering education, specifically in an effort to increase the range and quality of innovation and entrepreneurship offerings for undergraduate engineering students.