Nurturing future engineering skills through self-determined innovation and entrepreneurship project work: a case study of a Scottish university

Engineers can make a difference to the challenges of the next decade. However, the skills required by engineers to meet these requirements of society and industry require a new approach to engineering education that emphasises competencies of innovation, collaboration and value-based decision making. Complementarily, transversal and meta-skills will be required to support engineers and engineering students adapt to new, emergent technologies and problems. Consequently, within Scotland, meta-skills are increasingly embedded in authentic programmes (such as Graduate Apprenticeships) and incorporated within modules seeking to develop engineers and holistic engineering practice. This paper will present a case study of a Scottish University that, through one module, provides students with an opportunity to develop such future engineering skills.

In this third year module, a team of students are required to identify an opportunity that seeks to help a specific group within society through a Design Futures/Thinking approach, and then iteratively develop a desirable, viable and feasible solution over twelve weeks; students are required to self-align their ideation with UN SDGs. This paper will outline the skills that students develop from innovation, to empathy, to human-centred problem solving, to future/horizon scanning, to collaboration and self-awareness. Also, it will share student experiences about skills developed and the benefits and challenges of such an approach to nurturing skills relevant to employability in the 21st Century.