Systems Thinking: An Enabler for Innovation

Presenters: Dr. Thomas F. Gannon and Dr. Jamie P. Monat

As competition in today’s global economy continues to increase, companies must compete by developing innovative, high quality products and services while doing more with less. At the same time, advances in technologies continue to drive increased complexity in those products and services, while providing a wider range of business opportunities in new and existing markets.

This webinar will describe how systems thinking can enable the development of innovative products and services and fuel business growth by keeping the “big picture” in mind. Several examples will be discussed to demonstrate how Systems thinking has created tremendous competitive advantage for some companies, and also how a lack of systems thinking has placed several companies at a strategic disadvantage in today’s competitive global economy.

Systems Engineering: Building Innovation in Education 

Presenters: Dr. Shamsnaz Virani and Iris Burnham

This webinar will introduce Innovative Curriculum for Engineering in High School (ICE-HS) using systems engineering. Like most K-12 schools, the Da Vinci High school of science and arts was tasked to introduce engineering in their school with limited guide lines from the state. The two options available for the school were vendor prescribed curricula or several engineering activities such as egg drop. The research team reviewed several vendor prescribed curricula such as project lead the way and infinity, and digital libraries funded by NSF and ASEE such as teachengineering.org, cadrek12.org and egfi.org. The inflexibility of vendor sold curricula and lack of structure with the digital libraries posed some challenges for teaching engineering in high school. The school was also not fully utilizing its resources (teachers, community and technology) to assimilate engineering in their curriculum. ICE-HS was thus developed using systems engineering process with the goal of attracting the high school students to STEM and providing a flexible engineering foundation. This webinar will explain the approach to ICE-HS development, and its results after two years of application.  

Empowering Business Growth through Systems Engineering Leadership and Innovation

Presenter: Dr. Don S. Gelosh, PhD, CSEP-Acq.

This webinar will describe how enabling innovation and business growth is the future, the true destiny, of systems engineering. The thoughtful and deliberate application of systems engineering, systems thinking and leadership can enable more effective solutions for products, processes, services, technologies, and ideas, which in turn fuels innovation. Systems engineering can provide the methods and techniques necessary for efficiently handling fundamental engineering activities thus freeing up project leaders, engineers and designers to think effectively and creatively about innovative solutions; however, an organization’s leadership and workforce must learn and adopt in a practical way how systems engineering can fuel innovation and how innovation can lead to business growth. Therefore, it is crucial that academic institutions develop courses and curricula that reflect this powerful capability of systems engineering and leadership to enable their graduates to immediately put it into practice at their organizations. In addition to updating their graduate curricula, schools should offer technical short courses and workshops in systems engineering, leadership and innovation to help organizations successfully start down the path to better business growth.