Engineering innovation into systems engineering practices

A significant body of research exists about instilling a culture of innovation, but less is written about how to introduce innovation into systems engineering practices. Further, can suppress innovation. Our increasing need to conceive and develop more transformative concepts motivated an initiative to infuse innovation into our systems engineering. In particular, we introduce innovation into concept formulation, mockups, and early prototyping (front-end innovation) as well as system design, integration, and test (back-end innovation). We began by identifying culture-changing principles from the research literature and formulated an innovation framework oriented toward systems engineering from which to monitor our progress. Approaches to popularize staff empowerment and networking were introduced first, including leveraging crowd-sourced idea generation and the design thinking and maker movements into our systems practices. We also began to place greater emphasis on access to global technologies to search for enabling technology opportunities and potential research collaborators to feed concept development. Additionally, we had the opportunity to explore a more innovative approach to “agile” engineering development for which we provide a case study. Lastly, we developed measures and indicators of innovation progress, a relatively unexplored area according to the literature. We will describe the literature results, our initiatives, the case study, and the innovation metrics results to date.