Idea Engineering: Teaching Students how to Generate Ideas

The ability to generate ideas for solving problems and producing innovations is undoubtedly an important skill for any engineer. Usually, this is accomplished using well-known, but generic creativity techniques. These methods tend to be unstructured and somewhat random in their approach, and there are no clear guidelines available for their application. At the University of Magdeburg, we have taken an Engineering approach to the problem of producing ideas. We have reduced the large number of published creativity techniques to a small number of fundamental principles which can provide a basis for a systematic methodology for producing ideas. Based on our research results, we have created an undergraduate course entitled "Idea Engineering" which is attended by students from Engineering, Management, Computer Science and Social Sciences programs. Students work together in teams to design and build an "idea factory" which they then apply to real-life problems supplied by industry. Index Terms – Creativity Techniques, Idea Engineering, Ideation, Netstorming.