Beyond the Brick Wall: Aligning Engineering Education with Innovation Demands

We learned a lot when we facilitated a two-day workshop with engineering faculty who wanted to improve the way they prepared engineering students to be competitive in their jobs upon graduation. For one thing, they were using a standard definition of Engineering Design to teach students problem solving by focusing on optimizing more efficient solutions to predetermined engineering problems. For another, students were waiting to be given problems to solve rather than proactively finding them. This isn’t enough anymore. Additional challenges facing the school of engineering included:

• Education is becoming less affordable.
• The value of higher education is decreasing in the eyes of the public.
• What students expect from education seems to differ from what industry expects, which differs from what we are providing. 
• External forces are large and rapidly changing, and we have a fear of being creative to adapt.
• Global competition is growing.
• Universities are being asked to demonstrate their economic and social impact more clearly.
• Technology change is outpacing our traditional models of teaching and research.

As a result, the problems the school faces today have shifted from simple to more complex and more interdisciplinary, requiring teams to work together. They need to equip their graduates with the ability to adapt to this changing landscape.

The faculty team defined their problem and saw an opportunity to tackle the challenge: 

How might we apply creative problem solving to react to the complex challenges in higher education to reshape who we are becoming as a school and define an exciting identity we want to work towards?

Their plan was to train faculty, some of whom may be skeptical, in the Basadur creative problem solving process to innovate and become a leading school of engineering. 

MinSight: Many organizations have been efficiency minded for a long time and have hit a brick wall in trying to grow further. Now they need innovation to find a new way to grow. The Basadur Profile offers a simple approach to understanding what innovation is: The difference between solving everyday problems efficiently and generating new problems to provide a competitive edge. This approach could be adapted to educating and preparing students in any school or discipline on how to think creatively and be at the forefront of innovation.