Instilling New Ways of Understanding the Innovation Process: Evidence-Based Heuristics from Student Innovation Experiences

摘要

In the workplace, engineers face complex technological landscapes, critical and nuanced user needs and societal problems, and intense rivalry from competitors. To address these challenges, engineering programs have increasingly emphasized knowledge, skills, and mindsets related to innovation. Yet, innovation is a complex phenomenon (spanning diverse processes and environments), which can make it challenging to provide these opportunities and frame them within appropriate learning contexts. Recently, researchers have explored course design heuristics to bring expert reasoning, creativity, and efficiency to course design tasks. This study seeks to develop course design heuristics for innovation education by building upon two previous studies. In the first study, phenomenography supported the identification of distinct and hierarchically-varied ways of experiencing innovation among engineering students. In the second study, critical incident technique and thematic analysis led to identification of experiences that supported more comprehensive ways of experiencing innovation. In the current study, we reverse engineer heuristics by investigating instructional approaches that facilitated the critical incidents and how they supported new ways of experiencing innovation. Thirty-one undergraduate engineering students from 13 different engineering majors and over 40 distinct innovative design experiences participated in this study. Through a collaborative, inductive content analysis process, we identified 55 strategies (or what we refer to as Innovation Heuristics) evident in the critical incidents (e.g., features of instruction, the learning environment). These strategies were categorized into seven themes: (1) contextualize; (2) situate; (3) guide; (4) support; (5) challenge; (6) motivate; and (7) extend. The paper describes and details each theme and the associated Innovation Heuristics that supported innovation learning, including key examples from the data and how they may be used by instructors.