# Are you ready to innovate? Engineering students' perception of their skills to innovate

Lucie Gaudron, Klara Kövesi

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Lucie Gaudron, Klara Kövesi. Are you ready to innovate? Engineering students' perception of their skills to innovate. 45rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Sep 2017, Azores, Portugal. hal-05290534

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# Are you ready to innovate? Engineering students' perception of their skills to innovate

**L. Gaudron**

Graduate Engineering Student
ENSTA Bretagne
Brest, France

E-mail: lucie.gaudron@ensta-bretagne.org

**K. Kövesi**

Senior Lecturer

ENSTA Bretagne
Brest, France

E-mail: klara.kovesi@ensta-bretagne.fr

## ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore the self-perception of engineering students about their skills to innovate. We investigate what skills they need to innovate and to what extent they feel they are sufficiently well trained in their engineering school to work innovatively in their future career. Based on a recent literature review, we point out the essential skills required to innovate. We applied a methodology of sequential exploratory approach including at the first phase a preliminary exploratory study and a quantitative online survey at the second phase. Our results indicate that open mindedness; objective outlook and creativity are perceived as the most important for innovation activities. Surprisingly, half of the surveyed engineering students declared that they feel not to be sufficiently well trained to innovate. We found for several soft skills such as creativity, objective outlook, critical thinking and open mindedness an important divergence between their training and their perceived importance. On the contrary, for hard skills like knowledge, technical expertise and experience our results show a particularly good convergence. Our results suggest that better integration of soft skills to innovate in the engineering curriculum would be beneficial.

Conference Key Areas: Engineering Skills

Keywords: Engineering skills, Innovation, Students' perception

## INTRODUCTION

In our knowledge-based global society, the ability of industrial business organisations to innovate is an essential condition, if not the most important, of their survival on the globalised market. Consequently, they have to innovate continuously to retain their
market shares and keep their place. In order to obtain sustainable competitive advantages and high performances, they have to be able not only to follow the market's global trend, but to be always one step ahead of their competitors. There is no doubt that their engineers' skills play a central role in innovation and value creation. Furthermore, they are considered as the main investment to develop a successful innovation strategy [1]. For this reason, industrial organisations have a strong interest to recruit young engineers adequately skilled to innovate.

For the younger generations of engineers, innovation skills have become more crucial for their employment and career prospects [2]. In a context of post-industrial society, there is a strong requirement for the engineering profession to innovate. In the case of innovation work, young graduate engineers need a solid technical background but also various non-technical skills. They have to be able to create not only technological innovation but products, services, processes, social or societal innovations. Given this larger scope of required innovation capacity, they need a new and larger set of skills.

Our research is based on engineering students' perception. Indeed, the study aims to answer the following questions:

1. What are the most important skills needed to innovate from an engineering student's point of view?

2. Do students feel they are sufficiently well-trained in their engineering school to innovate?

3. What skills do they feel they lack regarding their own curriculum?

In this article, we will explore the perception of engineering students if they feel adequately prepared or not to innovate in their future professional life. First, we will discuss about the needed skills to innovate based on a recent literature review. Then, we will explain the applied methodologies for our research survey. In the next section, we will highlight significant results and their interpretations by outlining unexpected findings. To conclude, we are going to point out the limitations of our study and define future perspectives.

# 1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

The increase in global market competition experienced by many employers forced higher education to adjust the academic training [3]. Consequently, engineering education had to adapt its curriculum by extending its composition to meet a more diverse range of skills than was formerly required. Thus, non-technical skills, also called soft skills, gradually entered the engineering training and became an essential component of engineering courses. Communication, relationship management, intercultural management and analytical capacities -among others- are included in these soft skills. As a whole, they are supposed to enhance the adaptability of future engineers in the ever-changing world that surrounds us. It impels graduate engineers to become pioneers of innovation and makes them more valuable on the labour market.

In his work, Passow [4] developed an ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) competencies ranking regarding their level of importance for professional practice from a perception of graduate engineering students. It shows that soft skills like the ability to work in a team, communication and ethics are perceived as being the most valuable competencies of the ABET program, before sciences. There are significant deviations between the technical and non-technical skills. This result is quite surprising regarding the fact that technical competencies
are considered as the core competencies of engineering education. However, graduate engineering students evaluated these competencies as being less important in professional environments.

Innovation is a broad concept and there are many definitions for it in the literature. Between these definitions, the better-known is the definition by Oslo Manual [5] describing innovation as 'the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations'. This definition includes not only technical innovation but also different adaptations such as social, marketing, processing innovation etc. that require mainly non-technical skills for innovators. Especially for engineers, technical skills are really important to innovate but they have to complete these skills with a strong background of non-technical skills.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in skills needed to innovate. In 1985, Quinn [6] wrote one of the earliest papers about the most common skills that most innovators possess. She identifies several personal attributes that she observed in many innovative small companies: problem-solving abilities, multiple approach attitude, flexibility and the ability to adapt themselves to low resources. Following this idea, it was suggested that skills required to innovate are indeed a real issue and that the need for specific-skilled employees is not limited to the R&D function anymore [7]. Recently, it was observed by Toner [8] that only 2.2% of innovative firms recruited scientific personnel for innovation and that the skills recruited by the highest proportion of innovating firms were general business (22.6%), information technology (18.2%) and marketing (16.7%). He also studied the most common barrier for a business organisation to innovate, where lack of skilled staff is ranked as the third barrier to innovation (27.2%) behind cost and market related barriers. The phenomenon implies furthermore that specific skills identified as innovation skills are very valuable, especially for future innovators that graduate engineering students should be.

Boyd [9] introduces an innovation competency model in the industry where the core competencies are: creativity including generating ideas, critical thinking, synthetizing and problem solving; enterprising including identifying problem, seeking improvement, and gathering information; integrating perspectives such as openness to ideas and collaborating; and managing change regrouping sensitivity to situations, and intelligent risk-taking. A conceptual model was then developed by Harrison [10] for exploring skills for innovators. The model features indicators that influence innovation as a competence: cognition, technical knowledge, managing change and creativity. This means that these indicators of an individual's personality and abilities impact on that person's capacity to work innovatively. The two authors have a different approach of skills to innovate; indeed, Harrison [10] underlines the influence of the individual's character on the ability to innovate while Boyd [9] highlights the importance of possessing advanced specific skills.

All of the previously mentioned research papers studied a range of skills needed to innovate, however the alignment of these skills with the ones that graduate engineering students actually possess is not well-explored.

## 2 APPLIED METHODOLOGY

To complete the literature review, we applied a mixed methodological approach known as the sequential exploratory strategy [11]. It involves a first phase of qualitative data collection and analysis followed by a second phase of quantitative
data collection and analysis. First of all, an exploratory qualitative study was led by interviewing experimented engineers in order to define the most appropriate skills to innovate. Secondly, a quantitative study was carried out to target innovation skills and the way they are perceived by engineering students.

Our preliminary qualitative study was initially conducted to design the online survey. Twelve professional engineers operating in a highly innovative working environment were interviewed. We have chosen these professional engineers with different professional profiles working in diverse industrial sectors in order to have the most heterogeneous sample possible. The interviewees were asked to speak about innovation in a general sense. The discussions then continued towards the actual skills they consider essential to innovate. Each interview was recorded and then transcribed in order to facilitate the analysis of the corpus. This allowed us to outline eighteen skills related to engineers' ability to innovate.

The development of our quantitative study final structure was based on findings from the literature review and the results of the twelve qualitative interviews. The aim of this quantitative survey was to evaluate the impact of the engineering curriculum on the students' innovation skills and to highlight the domains where engineering students feel they are lacking. We designed an online survey that was sent to 678 engineering students at master level specialised in various fields (e.g.: electronics, mechanics, computer sciences etc...) to ensure the heterogeneity of the sample. First, the respondents were asked to evaluate the level of importance of innovation for the practice of engineering profession using a five-point Likert scale. The survey was then divided into two sets of questions. The first part questioned the perceived importance of the skillsets and competencies necessary to innovate. In the second part, we asked the respondents if they felt they were well-trained or not in their curriculum. We finally asked the students to indicate their missing skills.

We gathered answers from 181 students from a top engineering course in France that makes an answering rate of 26.7%. A method of ranking comparison of the eighteen skills evaluated by the students was used to analyse the data of the quantitative study.

## 3 RESULTS

Our findings clearly confirm the importance of innovation activities perceived by engineering students for practicing their future profession. They evaluated the importance of innovation activities for engineers at 4.24 on a five-point Likert scale in our online survey. This value correlates with the findings of our qualitative study where engineers' innovation capacities were outlined as a critical resource for industrial and business organisations. It was unanimously expressed by the interviewed professional engineers that innovation capacity is considered today as basic standard or transferable skills for modern engineers.

In order to understand what the most important skills to innovate are, we asked the participating engineering students to evaluate eighteen skills on a five-point scale (from "not important" to "vital"). Results indicate, as shown in Fig. 1, that soft skills such as open mindedness, objective outlook, creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving capacity are viewed by engineering students as the most valuable skills to innovate. Our findings are consistent with previous results of Passow [4], as knowledge and technical expertise that are generally viewed as basic skills of engineering profession were not considered as being the most important skills.
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Engineering students' perception of their skills to innovate</figcaption></figure>

We investigated on how well engineering students perceive they are being prepared in their engineering school to innovate: do they consider they are being sufficiently well-trained or not? Surprisingly, 49.7% of the participants affirmed that they do not feel sufficiently well-trained to innovate. These participants were asked to evaluate the engineering training they are undergoing in their engineering school for each skill on a scale from 'good' to 'poor'. The results of this evaluation are shown in Fig. 2, where 1 corresponds to 'poor training' level and 5 corresponds to 'good training' level.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Engineering students' perception of their training level to innovate</figcaption></figure>
Our results indicate that nearly all the skills considered by the students as being the most important for innovation activities (creativity, critical thinking, objective outlook and open mindedness) are also the ones they feel are the most poorly studied in their curriculum. It is interesting to note that the majority of participants (66.7%) consider that they are not sufficiently trained to develop their creativity. In the conceptual model of Harrison [10], creativity is considered as a cornerstone of innovation activities and one of the most valuable workforce skills for industrial and business organisations. For this reason, the future development of creativity, considered as a valuable intellectual ability, would be beneficial for engineering students and their future employees.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Comparison between the level of importance and perceived training</figcaption></figure>

We have made a comparison between the two evaluations of skills to innovate in order to observe the deviation between the level of importance and the level of their training perceived by engineering students'. The deviations are shown in Fig. 3. On one hand, there is a particularly good match between the perceived level of hard skills like knowledge, technical expertise and experience. On the other hand, we can observe a huge gap between the most important skills for working innovatively like creativity, objective outlook, critical thinking and open mindedness. This outcome is in a sharp contrast with the fact that these skills were considered as the most important skills for innovation activities. However, we can observe a positive deviance only in the case of team working and multidisciplinarity where the perceived training level is slightly beyond the perceived importance.

## 4 CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

To conclude, our study confirms the importance of integrating innovation skills in the engineering curriculum in order to train modern professional engineers. According to our results, engineering students have a satisfactory evaluation of their training of hard skills needed to innovate. It is not surprising given that these hard skills traditionally benefit from a higher consideration and a stronger emphasis in the curriculum development. Controversially it was not the case for soft skills training. It
was evaluated by the majority of students as having an insufficient level. However, these soft skills are considered as more important than hard skills by engineering students, contrary to the traditional perception. We would like to highlight the existing discrepancy between the hard and soft skills development to innovate.

Our research suggests that soft skills to innovate should be better integrated in engineering curriculum to ensure a higher level of innovation capacity for graduate engineers. We are conscious that this integration is a huge challenge and would be difficult to accomplish suddenly, but the results of this study might be taken as a suggestion for a progressive change. For the future generation of modern engineers 'the mastery of innovation skills will become paramount for a successful career [12:60]. Consequently, young engineers' capacity to innovate would be one of the most important elements of their professional skills, having a direct influence on their future employability.

To further our research, we intend to compare engineering students' self-perception of their skills to innovate and the industrial business organisation perception of young graduate engineers' who are freshly employed in their organisations. This study aims to give us a better understanding and clearer vision of how to develop engineering curriculums to reduce the gap between the reality and requirements.

## REFERENCES

[1] Munjal, S., & Kundu, S. (2017), Exploring the Connection Between Human Capital and Innovation in the Globalising World. In Human Capital and Innovation Palgrave Macmillan UK., pp. 1-11.

[2] Lowden, K., Hall, S., Elliot, D., & Lewin, J. (2011), Employers' Perceptions of the Employability Skills of New Graduates. London: Edge Foundation.

[3] Mason, G., Williams, G., Cranmer, S. (2006), Employability Skills Initiatives in Higher Education: What Effects Do they Have on Graduate Labour Market Outcomes?, *Education Economics*, Vol. 17, pp. 1-30.

[4] Passow, H. J. (2012), Which ABET Competencies Do Engineering Graduates Find Most Important in their Work?, *Journal of Engineering Education*, Vol. 101, Num. 1, pp. 95-118.

[5] OECD and EUROSTAT (2005), The Measurement of Scientific and Technological Activities, *Oslo Manual Guidelines for Collecting and Interpreting Innovation Data*, 3rd Edition.

[6] Quinn, J. B. (1985), Managing Innovation: Controlled Chaos, *Harvard Business Review*, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 73-84.

[7] Leiponen, A. (2005), Skills and Innovation, *International Journal of Industrial Organization*, Num. 23, pp. 303-323.

[8] Toner, P. (2011), Workforce Skills and Innovation: an Overview of Major Themes in the Literature, *OECD Education Working Papers*, Num. 55, pp. 1-73., Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5kgk6hpnhxzq-en.

[9] Boyd, D. (2011), Innovation Competency Model, Available at: www.innovationexcellence.com.
[10] Harrison, A.E. (2015), Exploring Skills for Innovators, 5th International Conference on Engaged Management Scholarship: Baltimore, Maryland, September 10-13, 2015.

[11] Creswell, J. W. (2009), Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches, SAGE Publications, 3rd Edition.

[12] Kamp, A. (2016), Engineering Education in a Rapidly Changing World: Rethinking the Vision for Higher Engineering Education, TU of Delft, 2nd Edition.