Training Engineers for Innovation

11 Developing Methods and Programs for Teaching Innovation to Engineers: Toward Eco-Innovation?

11.1. Introduction

The study presented in this chapter aims to contribute to the development of new programs capable of training engineers for innovation via an original and pragmatic approach applicable in various institutional contexts. This approach is the result of research conducted as part of the project Innov’ing 2020. This work demonstrated the need to revise teaching methods and to produce original pedagogical approaches that include a global or sociotechnical point of view in order to prepare innovators to respond to the social concerns of tomorrow.

The approach to innovation adopted here is holistic, aiming to link the technical dimension of innovation to its social, cultural, economic, political and ethical dimensions. It employs an increased mobilization of the human and social sciences (hereafter designated by the acronym HSS) relative to current curricula (see Chapter 10), and employs a more reflexive approach to engineering education favoring distance taking, critical thinking and the encouragement of the kind of awareness of social surroundings necessary for producing situated innovations (see Chapter 1).

What types of educational methods meet these expectations? How can we design new courses better adapted to the needs that we identify? How can we train engineers for sociotechnical or socially situated innovation?

Rethinking innovation training in a pragmatic and ...