The University of Maine was so excited that President Bob Kennedy, with the support of Hemant Pendse, Jake Ward, and Renee Kelly, committed to an experimental course in Innovation. During the fall of 2005, the first Innovation Engineering course was taught at the University of Maine with Margo Lukens, Darrell Donahue, and Liz Downing teaching nine pioneering students.
In 2009 I took a sabbatical from the Eureka! Ranch and lived on campus to help build version 1.0 of the Innovation Engineering courses. On December 10, 2009, following an event in Freeport, Maine, with business owners, it became clear that Innovation Engineering had to move from the campus to the business world. On a conference call with Renee Kelly of the University of Maine and Maggie Nichols and Scott Dunkle of the Eureka! Ranch, the Innovation Engineering movement as a commercial leadership science was born. During January of 2010, at the Sugarloaf Ski Resort, we ran the first three-day Innovation Engineering Leadership Institute. The program was raw and rough. Despite that, the reaction from CEOs of large and small companies in attendance was overwhelmingly positive.
The response we received at Sugarloaf indicated that the world was ready for system-driven innovation. To be honest, I also think we got lucky, as the recession of 2008 had opened up leadership to the need to do something different. They knew they needed to innovate, and, frankly, the “guru” approach wasn’t working for them with its 5% to 15% success rate.
The Innovation Engineering Curriculum
With the support of what would become known as the Innovation Engineering Pioneers, a full body of knowledge was defined that was both academically rigorous and industry relevant. There are 48 critical skills, each with 2 to 4 subskills. Today, six courses are taught: 1) Fundamentals, 2) Advanced Create, 3) Advanced Communicate, 4) Advanced Commercialize, 5) System-Driven Leadership, and 6) Innovation Engineering Experience. The Innovation Engineering logo includes an icon for each of the key skill areas: Create, Communicate, and Commercialize.
Details on the current curriculum can be found at innovationengineering.org (I haven’t included it here, as it undergoes never-ending innovation, as all college courses should). We upgrade and improve each course each year, based on new data, analysis, and the frontline experiences of the Innovation Engineering community.
Scheduling issues and the high cost of college courses can make it challenging for students to complete the six courses. To reach the maximum number of students, the first course, Fundamentals, was designed to provide a functional knowledge of the three fundamental skills of creating, communicating, and commercializing innovations. Students completing the fundamentals course at a high standard are certified as Innovation Engineering Blue Belts.
Upon completing all classes on campus, students graduate with an Innovation Engineering minor or a graduate certificate. They also have the option of becoming a Certified Innovation Engineering Black Belt.
Off campus, frontline employees, managers, and executives are taught the same content as on campus—but in a compressed format that integrates the learning with direct application to their real-world work. The Innovation Engineering Network offers two programs of training, application coaching, and certification:
Innovation Engineering Blue Belt enables fundamental understanding. It teaches employees, managers, and leaders how to apply the Innovation Engineering mindset and methods to their personal and professional lives immediately.
Innovation Engineering Black Belt enables mastery of the Innovation Engineering system-driven innovation mindset. It enables them to bust bureaucratic systems and enable big ideas. Classically, Black Belts focus their work on leading very important projects or teaching other employees, managers, and leaders.
A New Way of Learning—Cycles to Mastery
Jake Ward of the University of Maine first identified that we needed to develop both a great curriculum and a new way of learning. Creating a new way of teaching was especially important because, as a new field of study, there was not a base of faculty who had the breadth and depth of experience with system-driven innovation.
Two years of R&D later, a new system of teaching was born and branded as Cycles to Mastery. Its purpose is to enable all who are willing to achieve mastery of Innovation Engineering. It’s based on iterative cycles of learning. It blends: 1) the work of Benjamin Bloom on the 2 Sigma Problem, 2) formative assessment, 3) Deming PDSA cycles, 4) quality control charting, 5) flipped classroom, and 6) competency-based learning. It involves five different types of classes:
DIGITAL CLASS: These classes involve five- to seven-minute videos that cover the core content of each of the Innovation Engineering subskills. Interactive quizzes feed forward what students have learned and not learned to the instructor, so that adaptations can be made in the next class.
LAB CLASS: The digital content is made real through group and individual assignments in which students get hands-on understanding of the content. Feedback loops provide grading of each assignment. Each student is given the opportunity to resubmit till they achieve success. The percentage correct on each assignment is fed forward to the instructor, so that the next class can be modified appropriately.
APPLICATION CLASS: Students are challenged to put the subskill learning into a broader context. Students apply the new learning plus prior learning on realistic scenarios or challenges.
REFLECTION CLASS: Students write a reflection on what they have learned and how they can apply it in their lives. This solidifies the learning at a deeper level.
EXPERIENCE CLASS: These are real-world challenges. They are used to bring the learning to life. Off campus, the experience class involves coaching the student in applying the learning to their daily work. On campus, the experience is flexible. It can be part of an internship. It can be creating a new invention, starting a company, or leading an innovation project for the university that the student attends.
Cycles to Mastery has been shown to generate 200% to 400% increases in the number of students achieving mastery levels versus the classic teaching approach. Multiple learning experiences take the student from intellectually knowing to deeply understanding the skills.
When we teach Innovation Engineering on college campuses, the students get rich repetition. Off campus, we accomplish repetitions by coaching the students as they apply the learning to their projects. Ken Grier, creative director for the Macallan and an Innovation Engineering Black Belt, feels that applying his learning to his work was the most valuable part of the process: “The forced rigor of actually doing it, practicing it, getting coaching feedback was 70% of my learning.” Ken’s observation of the importance of hands-on application was confirmed by Deming Master Walter Werner: “Education begins when you leave school, not while you are there. The classroom is not the hard part, not even close.”
The most exciting aspect of Cycles to Mastery is that it includes a system for never-ending increases in the mastery standard. Control charts identify when the classes are so effective that student learning has risen above control limits. This signifies that it’s time to increase the difficulty of assignments and therefore raise the mastery standards. In effect, Cycles to Mastery delivers “Learning Inflation” instead of “grade inflation.”
On campus, students give enthusiastic support for the Cycles to Mastery teaching method.
How is this better? Less stress. This approach allows the information to stick in your head so you don’t forget it. The applying is the important part that makes it stick. No more information regurgitation.
Failing isn’t a bad thing here. You lose your fear of failing here, because it’s okay. Because you are doing live grading, it’s like [the instructors] are working with us, not against us.
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