The Effects of Open Innovation on Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing in Student Design Teams

As the need to innovate more creatively and effectively becomes increasingly apparent in engineering design, powerful open design tools and practices have emerged that are allowing organizations and firms to tap an already vast pool of skills, knowledge and intellect to solve complex design problems. The need for engineering design educators to bring these new trends into the classroom continues to grow as the industry for which students are being prepared begins to revamp its design strategies and practices in the pursuit of more openly accessible information infrastructures. By conducting an experimental study of over 25 student design groups in an undergraduate design engineering class, our team was able to gauge the relevance and utility of collaboration and knowledge sharing between and within design groups. Specifically, issues and opportunities were identified to help bring engineering and design education in line with the increasingly networked and distributed professional engineering environment that students will be enter upon graduation.