The diverse personas of engineering innovators

• Autores: Daniel M. Ferguson, Kathryn W. Jablokow, Matthew W. Ohland, Senay Purzer
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 33, no. 1 (Parte A), 2017, págs. 19-29
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Over the past four years, fifty-three peer-nominated engineering innovators were interviewed about the process of creatinginnovations and the personal characteristics of engineers who do so successfully. These interviewees were drawn fromacross all engineering disciplines and all types and sizes of organizations where they were employed. Our main objectivewas to better understand the behavioral characteristics that lead engineers to discover, develop, and implementinnovations in products, processes, or concepts. We call this behavior engineering innovativeness. This paper describesour rigorous process for discovering the essence ofengineering innovativenessand its characteristics. As portraits ofengineering innovativeness, we present 10 unique personas of engineering innovators gathered from our interviews.Identifying the behavioral characteristics of innovative engineers and their personas is important to both the education ofstudent engineers and the professional development of practicing engineers. If engineers are expected to behave in aninnovative manner in their academic and professional endeavors, then understanding the behavioral characteristics andpersonas of ‘expert’ or ‘master’ innovative engineers is an essential first step in learning to behave in an innovative manneror to become more innovative as an engineer. We discovered that there is not one type of engineering innovator or a singlegroup of characteristics that define engineering innovativeness; rather, there are many different types of engineeringinnovators, as evidenced by the unique groupings of engineering innovativeness characteristics identified by our experts.