Engineering innovativeness

Abstract

This paper explores engineering innovativeness. The data is drawn from a set of 8 interviews of experienced engineers and engineering educators. The research question is: "What set of intrinsic abilities, when combined with extrinsic factors, enable engineers to create innovations that benefit society? The six most important innovative behavior attributes of engineers suggested by the interviewees were: domain knowledge, opportunity recognition, teamwork skills, the willingness to listen to others strengthened by curiosity, risk taking or the willingness to risk failure, and persistence. Creativity was seen as essential to jump start the innovation process but clearly not sufficient for getting an idea successfully introduced into the marketplace. Entrepreneurial behavior was also seen as a critical component of the innovation process but not sufficient unto itself for creating a successful innovation. Innovation creation was seen as a process that can be taught, as knowledge that can be acquired or as skills that can be strengthened. On the other hand there was a strong belief that some aspects of innovativeness are based upon relatively fixed personality characteristics. Future plans include building on these interviews and creating and validating a new engineering innovativeness instrument based on community-derived factors to benchmark and assess the development of engineering innovativeness factors within engineering students and practicing engineers. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.