Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This paper describes an ideation exercise, brainwriting (a variation on brainstorming), used to improve two undergraduate programs of a small engineering department.Two generations of senior engineering students from two consecutive years as well as the engineering faculty completed the exercise.The ideas resulting from the exercise were grouped into categories, ranked, discussed at the faculty meetings, and then some of them implemented, some discarded, and some presented to the University administration as action items. Introduction and Previous WorkWhile talking about clean energy President Obama stated in his weekly address on October 2 nd 2010 that "Our future as a nation depends on making sure that the jobs and industries of the 21 st century take root here in America. 1 " The innovation productivity and quality must increase to stop the country's technological and manufacturing decline.While most engineering programs produce solid problem solvers, this may not be sufficient.The education of engineers must also enhance their inventive and entrepreneurial skills by including topics on innovation methods, disruptive technologies, intellectual property, entrepreneurship, etc. Engineering design is a crucial component of engineering practice.Most engineering students become familiar with engineering design process steps and disciplinary design methods through design-oriented engineering courses.Concept generation or ideation is a step in the engineering design process where new ideas take shape.Subject expertise coupled with general intelligence may lead to creation of new ideas (ideation).Some of these ideas may lead to innovative problem solutions or inventions.Usually, the creation of a working physical (sometimes improved) prototype ends the innovation process and starts the entrepreneurial process (commercialization).Creativity, in general, can be quantitatively measured as a number of novel ideas.In engineering, the quality (feasibility) of these ideas is also addressed.In engineering education, a number of techniques are implemented to develop creativity and enhance ideation capabilities of students.These techniques include brainstorming 2 , brainwriting 3 , collaborative sketching 4 , morphological analysis 5 , transformational design using mind-mapping 6 , design by analogy 7 , principles of historical innovators 8 , and various combinations of the aforementioned techniques 9 .Developing an ability to innovate has been approached through improvisation 10 , the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] , and the S-field (also referred as Su-field) theory 21 .One of the commonly used techniques in ideation is brainstorming (especially when solving generic, non-engineering problems).Brainstorming, a group ideation method first introduced in 1963 22 , is well described in engineering design textbooks 2,3,14,15 .However, there are some findings that invalidate the use of this approach.For example, McGrath 23 claims that a group of people working together on a problem would accomplish less (fewer and lower-quality concepts)
Author: Nebojsa Jaksic
Institution: Colorado State University Pueblo
Language: English
Subfield: Mechanical Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4409668661