Robert Davis
Beebe Nelson
How purdue university is
preparing engineers to work in a
world where innovation is vital
Robert Davis, assistant Department Head of purdue university’s School of
engineering education ( rndavis@purdue.edu), and Beebe Nelson, Director,
iapD ( bnelson@workingforums.com)
At many companies, engineers play a pivotal role in new product development—but until recently, their training did not include many of
the disciplines involved in NPD. In this article we describe the new directions Purdue’s College of Engineering is pursuing. These were
presented by Robert Davis at the workshop on the innovation workforce of the future held last year by the IAPD (Innovation and Product
Development, a Corporate Member Program of the PDMA).1
The job of engineers in innovation and product development has changed radically over the past couple of decades. In the days before cross-functional teaming, engineers took their
orders from marketing or sales or from the creative folks who ran
brainstorming sessions. They took their orders from them, but they
rarely followed the orders—they tried to figure out how to seem
to respond to their colleagues’ often boring requests while at the
same time having fun coming up with more elegant solutions than
their colleagues could ever have thought of.
With the advent of cross-functional teaming, engineers have
had more exposure to the problem-finding space, joining their
colleagues on visits to customers. They no longer work alone in
the solution-creating space. Instead they participate in creativity
sessions, test ideas and prototypes with customers, and prepare for
reviews that include input from the whole cross-functional team.
It is engineers, for the most part, who have learned to incorpo-rate design principles into the understanding of customer needs. It
is the engineer on your team who can actually create the solution
to the deep, unmet, latent needs that you have collaboratively
turned up through an ethnographic understanding of the customer
environment.
”Engineer, redesign thyself!”
In April 2004 Purdue launched the first School of Engineering
Education. The unit was created on the premise that, although
engineering research is applied to a wide range of fields, it had not
been applied to the process of educating engineers. Purdue explored
questions of how students learn the knowledge areas, qualities, and
abilities that are essential to becoming an engineer in today’s world,
and how they might understand the technology behind teaching and
teaching environments to better ensure the outcome.
The School of Engineering Education at Purdue has eliminated
its traditional “gateway classroom”—the one with 20 rows of
dozens of desks where you dozed off after a long hard night of
studying (in Bob’s student days it was called SLEEP 100)—in
favor of studios where small groups of students can work together
on engineering problems. There is a design studio, an innovation
studio, a prototyping studio, a demonstration studio—settings that
are reminiscent of the collaborative spaces that Herman Miller
showed us at the IAPD workshop on the innovation workforce
of the future. 2 The course content has morphed from learning
computer skills to practicing engineering thinking, design, and
problem solving in organized teams.
Creating the curriculum
The Purdue School of Engineering Education brought together
a seemingly disparate collection of four programs, each of which
focuses on critical aspects of educating tomorrow’s workforce.
The First-Year Engineering Program introduces students to key
disciplines while they are heavily engaged in solving problems.
The problems the students work on include some of the 14 Grand
Challenges for Engineering identified by the National Academy of
Engineering (NAE), which include making solar energy economi-cal, preventing nuclear terrorism, advancing health informatics,
and engineering the tools of scientific discovery. They also include
problems identified by students in the course of the work experi-ence that is part of the first-year program.
The other three units include a B. S. in the Interdisciplinary
Engineering Studies and Multidisciplinary Engineering Program,
which students can elect to pursue after the First-Year Engineering
Program, a Graduate Program, and an Institute for P- 12 Engineer-
ing Research and Learning (INSPIRE) Program designed to help
pre-college teachers introduce young people to the joys of engi-neering. In the INSPIRE Program, Purdue faculty and graduate
students run intensive hands-on sessions to help teachers design
ways of reaching their students—and so the initial question of
“how can we design and develop the engineer of the future?” is
brought full circle to include the engineering experiences of the
very young.
There is an urban legend that the introduction of Legos spurred
the development of a whole generation of engineers. Now, as
the role of the engineer is changing, as half of our engineers are
eligible to retire in the next five years, as interest in engineering
has declined over the past decade, and as the United States is
facing increasing competition in technological leadership from
all corners of the globe, it is time for a new approach. Purdue is
leading the way.
Endnotes
1. “Notes from the IAPD: Companies explore the innovation workforce
of the future at workshop in San Diego,” Visions, pp. 14–15, July 2009
2. “Notes from the IAPD,” Visions, pp. 14–15, July 2009
