Fusion — Applied Skills — 01
Structured Approaches to Innovation and Research
Innovation happens inside organizations at many levels and under very different circumstances. The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas — it is that an organization's own talents and habits quietly bound which ideas it can even recognize.
As researchers, members of an organization make unexpected discoveries, improvements, and breakthroughs that may or may not connect to anything the organization can fruitfully pursue. As engineers, they are encouraged to explore solutions against pre-established goals and constraints — and in doing so sometimes miss the openings that would take the organization somewhere genuinely new.
Even organizations with refined, well-empowered approaches to innovation eventually confront the same limit: their experience is finite, and the highest-value innovation may sit outside it. And once a promising innovation has been unearthed, realizing its potential demands an uncomfortable hybrid of creativity and organizational discipline.
Fusion students examine that process directly — the structure of organizational innovation, and the range of approaches available for addressing these problems.
Methodologies — review and comparison of well-established approaches, including TRIZ, stage gates, ITM, and NABC. Management drivers — the policy and economic forces behind discovery, design, and structured innovation.
This skill anchors the first module of the fall core course, where teams construct formal needs statements before they are permitted to discuss a solution, and it is the explicit subject of EPOM 411.