Improving the innovative mindset of engineers

Abstract

To innovate requires people. People that know how to innovate. For engineers, it is not always easy to do that. They know a lot about technology (feasibility) but could lack knowledge about the business (viability) and the market (desirability). This report aims to help engineers create a more innovative mindset and thereby boost the innovation output of their organization.A case study into Croonwolter&dros (CWD) explores the problems they encounter with innovation. CWD is a system integrator specializing in engineering and installing technical systems. They have over 140 years of experience in this field and aim to launch three new product-market combinations (PMC’s) a year. Currently, they are working hard to achieve this but have not managed to do so.From several interviews with stakeholders, I learned that knowledge sharing between divisions and colleagues is one of CWD’s issues. CWD is divided into three divisions: Infrastructure, Utility, and Industry. All these divisions have to develop their own business. This causes them to form silos where there is little to no cross-departmental collaboration. Therefore this case study focuses on addressing the lack of knowledge sharing to boost the innovation output of CWD.To understand what knowledge is needed in the organization, I analyzed innovations that are under development at CWD. This analysis showed that CWD employees mainly focus on the feasibility of their innovations and do not pay as much attention to the viability and desirability of their innovations. Because of that, they fail to fully convince essential stakeholders of their innovations’ potential.To tackle this problem, I organized three ideation sessions with innovators to brainstorm ideas that could create a more complete story around their innovations. Three different concepts resulted from these brainstorms. All with the potential to boost the innovation output of CWD. I needed a clear reference frame to compare and decide between the three concepts. The initial plan was to see which concept fitted best to the innovation strategy of CWD, but the innovation strategy was, at that point, too vague andambiguous to decide between the concepts. Therefore I chose to set a clear starting point for innovation at CWD. This resulted in the six principles for innovation at CWD. Based on these principles, I decided to combine two concepts. These concepts are the foundations of IVI.IVI (Iedereen Voor Innovatie) is an approach to boost the innovation output of CWD by improving the innovative mindset of CWD’s innovators. IVI consist of a business development team that helps the innovators. Everyone at CWD with an idea can go to the development team and ask for help. Together they will make a smoke test. This smoke shows the idea to a broad audience via a web page. Everyone can leave comments, questions, or suggestions on this web page. The innovator can use this data to improve his or her innovation. The development team also collects this data for further analysis. From the data, the best performing innovations are invited to the innovation fair. All fair visitors can invest a number of hours into innovations they see potential in. The innovators can use these hours to progress their innovations. If the innovators fail to get enough engagement on their smoke test or to convince enough investors, they know they have to improve their innovation’s viability, desirability, and feasibility. The development team can help them with that.IVI was received positively in an early validation session, both by several stakeholders as well as by the CWD board. Further testing is needed to validate additional assumptions around IVI, but there are no major game stoppers at this time. IVI could be implemented by first putting together the development team. They can become the product owners of IVI and continue implementing IVI. The team should start by actively approaching CWD employees that have an idea to get the ball rolling and create the first smoke tests. From there, they can move on the organizing the first innovation fair. After a significant period, they can organize training and coaching sessions to further boost the innovative mindset of CWD’s innovators and engineers. This completes the implementation of IVI and should, in theory, help CWD to reach its goal of launching three new product- market combinations a year. IVI partly democratizes innovation, and future research might even find applications for this concept in a broader context.