Open the ‘black box’ creativity and innovation: a study of activities in R&D departments. Some prospects for engineering education

Abstract

Innovation is a key component to the success and longevity of companies. Our research opens the ‘black box’ of creativity and innovation in R&D teams. We argue that understanding the nature of R&D projects in terms of creativity/innovation, efficiency/inefficiency, is important for designing education policies and improving engineering curriculum. Our research addresses the inventive design process, a lesser known aspect of the innovation process, in 197 R&D departments of industrial sector companies in France. One fundamental issue facing companies is to evaluate processes and results of innovation. Results show that the evaluation of innovation is confined by a lack of methodology of inventive projects. We will be establishing the foundations of a formal ontology for inventive design projects and finally some recommendations for engineering education.

BibTeX

@article{millet:hal-02398179,
  TITLE = {{Open the ‘black box' creativity and innovation: a study of activities in R\&D departments. Some prospects for engineering education}},
  AUTHOR = {Millet, Charlyne and Oget, David and Cavallucci, Denis},
  URL = {https://hal.science/hal-02398179},
  JOURNAL = {{European Journal of Engineering Education}},
  PUBLISHER = {{Taylor \& Francis}},
  VOLUME = {42},
  NUMBER = {6},
  PAGES = {1000-1024},
  YEAR = {2017},
  MONTH = Nov,
  DOI = {10.1080/03043797.2016.1249341},
  KEYWORDS = {curriculum gap ; engineering education ; inventiveness ; innovation ; creativity},
  HAL_ID = {hal-02398179},
  HAL_VERSION = {v1},
}