Incremental improvement: an essential component of engineering design

Engineering curricula focus a disproportionate part of their design component on the design of new products and processes. In practice, an engineer must tackle an imperfect existing process or product (which can be improved) more often than a requirement to build a completely new one. To address this discrepancy between curricula and engineering practice, we are developing process-improvement modules, initially targeted to the chemical engineering domain. Though design is usually carried out in capstone courses, incremental process improvement is suitable for earlier portions of the curriculum, because students have from the outset an entire feasible design (which would be impossible for them to derive on their own without comprehensive engineering-science background), and they need only consider modest changes to it. An engineer should be able to examine an operating process or industrial system and identify ways in which it can be improved (including pollution abatement, cost reduction, better quality, or improved reliability). This important engineering ability must be cultivated by explicit incremental improvement modules and case studies in the curriculum