Workshops will be offered to teachers and engineers interested in earning Continuing Education Units/ Professional Education Units or Graduate Credits for their assistance in judging the Science and Engineering Expo on March13, 2010.

 

Engineering Workshop Topic:

Utilizing a Creative Problem Solving Process to Advance the Organizational Creativity

In this engineer’s workshop, a creative problem solving process will be introduced and the role of engineers will be discussed to advance an organization’s creativity.

Organizational creativity is presented as four distinctly different sequential stages of a dynamic cognitive problem solving process: generation, conceptualization, optimization, and implementation. The generation stage is the activity that initiates the creative process.  It is disruptive, because it entails proactively and deliberately seeking and discovering brand new problems and opportunities. The second stage, conceptualization, is the activity of problem construction, identification, or formulation.  Such second stage activity gives definition to a newly discovered problem freshly emerging from the first stage or to a presented or otherwise already existing problem. Many individuals are most comfortable in only one or two of these stages and research shows that the people who prefer the generation stage activity are often under-represented in industrial organizations.

This workshop will present and suggest how organizations can increase creativity and innovation by understanding and recognizing the contributions made by people preferring the generator style, and by making generator activity more attractive for all members of the organization. Hands-on activities will be incorporated into the workshop.

 

Teacher’s Workshop Topic: