You're a Mechanical Engineer who wants to foster innovation in your team. How can you do it?

Brainstorming and allowing all ideas is crucial, but doing it right - you need to cultivate the best environment as you brainstorm, which includes fostering a sense of equality and unity among everyone present, some excitement, and absolutely an element of bizarre-ness. You want your ideas to diverge as much as possible, and glean from those ideas what makes each interesting and good fundamentally. Only then will you have all the ideas necessary that must mix for an innovative final solution.

To foster innovation in your team, encourage a culture of creativity and risk-taking. Provide resources, support, and dedicated time for brainstorming and collaboration. Recognize and reward innovative ideas, and promote continuous learning and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Lead by example, seek feedback, and create a safe environment for experimentation and exploration.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs I've seen on problems comes with brainstorming on defining the problem. Is it the right problem to solve? Are you addressing your Requirements and Root Cause? How can you rephrase it? Does this change what actions you'd take? There's a lot of well researched methods on ways to do this. Two I'd suggest are TRIZ and the Creative Problem Solving process. Feel free to reach out to me if you're interested in more.

In my opinion, creating an environment that promotes creativity, cooperation and sustained improvement is part of promoting innovation in any engineering team, even more so for mechanical engineers. I see Promoting teamwork and the sharing of ideas as one of the critical aspects for growth in any technical team. Being open to diverse perspectives which can in turn spark innovation, acknowledging the fact that, failure is often a step towards innovation. In this case both successes and failures should be viewed as learning opportunities. To top it up, as the team lead, I’m called upon to demonstrate own willingness to innovate. Being open to new ideas and provide clear direction and support for innovative efforts.

Fostering innovation in a mechanical engineering team involves creating an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and experimentation. Strategies include promoting open communication, cross-functional collaboration, providing learning resources, allocating time for innovation, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, recognizing and rewarding innovation, providing access to tools and technologies, and leading by example. These strategies help create a culture of innovation that empowers the team to drive continuous improvement in their work.

One thing we'd do when preparing preliminary design reviews, is make sure at least one proposed solution utilizes new technologies we may not have deployed before - whether known solutions from similar fields or solutions that are still being researched and are yet to be field tested.

Brainstorming, whether on the fly at the coffee machine or in a dedicated meeting will shake the dust off and activate the imagination. Accept any ideas and make people comfortable to share their deepest thoughts. This is like a gym for the brain.

For Team innovation we need difene the Goal, KPI and Target. Problem is Gap between plan vs actual. Problems need to be brainstormed and set in 80:20 rule. Implementation to be planned as per 🐠 Fishbone diagram. Analysis to be done for improvement in target. Finally celebration of sucess for team and appreciation to team is important...

Brainstorming is NOT just getting a group together and spitting out ideas until you find the one everyone dislikes the least. It's an active process with a person identified as the moderator and another as the problem owner. This frees up the remaining people to offer ideas without judgement. It's also a DIVERGENT process, meaning that the goal is to generate ideas. After you have the ideas, you can CONVERGE by building the positive aspects of the generated ideas into a better solution (and some backups!).

Sketching and Diagramming : Encourage team members to visually represent their ideas through sketches, diagrams, or flowcharts. This can help in visualizing concepts and identifying potential areas for improvement.

One thing that I found we do on regular basis in the team is to evaluate the ideas on differential engineering judgement for each ideas to reach consensus on final idea that adds up as value engineering in the project.

Evaluate the brainstormed ideas based on criteria such as feasibility, impact, and alignment with project goals. Encourage constructive feedback and discussion to refine and prioritize the most promising ideas.

While we all have a tendency to gravitate towards the more simple and conservative ideas, it's important to give way to at least one "wildcard" idea, even if it's more complex, avant-garde, and high-tech. Even if it fails, there's a good chance of gaining new knowledge and insights.

Evaluating ideas is one of the key filters that kills innovations. It's easy to find reasons why an idea won't work. Part of selecting ideas should be having more innovative (blue sky) ideas on a parallel development path with key milestones and dates where they can be incorporated if they pan out. Developing a robust Knowledge Management process to capture knowledge gained and enable it's reuse will mean that even if they aren't ready on this project, they may be on the next one!

Ao fim de análises, estudos e reuniões, ideias que surgem podem se tornar melhorias em equipamentos, em procedimentos ou a necessidade de treinamento das pessoas. Como disse Taiichi Ohno, pai do sistema toyota de produção: "O progresso não pode acontecer quando estamos satisfeitos com as situações existentes".

1. As a Mechanical Engineer, I want my team to be good at coming up with new ideas and solutions. 2. Encourage everyone in the team to not be selfish and work together and share their ideas. 3. Remind everyone that we should always be learning and trying to improve.

Develop prototypes or proofs of concept for selected ideas to test their feasibility and effectiveness. Encourage experimentation and iteration to refine the solutions further. Involve team members in the testing process to gather valuable insights and feedback.

There are 2 things I'd bring up on this point. First, training yourself and your team to understand what assumptions you can make to test things quickly. Do you need a full detailed CAD model or will basic blocks work? Second, Virtual Prototyping through the use of simulation (Finite Element Analysis, Multi-Body Dynamic Analysis, Optimization techniques) have come a long way in the last 10 years and AI is disrupting it even further. Use the tools at your disposal!

As a Mechanical Engineer and Welding Engineer, would like to use WAAM(Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing) Technology to make a prototype for a big designed structures and to do testing to check all the mechanical and electrical properties of the prototype object. Collect all the data by using IoT and implement these datas and inputs to make the actual finnal product which would be helpful to improve the Technology and life of people.

Continuously iterate on the prototypes based on testing results and feedback. Encourage a culture of continuous improvement, where team members are empowered to refine and enhance their ideas iteratively.

No idea is fully formed when it first comes into your head. No design as foreseen everything. We tend to buy-in to the idea of new products causing a huge disruption in the market place. But often there were many earlier attempts before one takes off. Example: iPhone: introduced in 2007 to huge fanfare and revolutionized phones. LG Prada: introduced in 2006. Same basic functionality as the iPhone; no one remembers it. Nokia 9000: introduced in 1996. Email, fax, and web browser functionality. Too expensive to gain wide acceptance. IBM Simon: introduced in 1994. Touch screen, email, faxes, web browser, calendar, note pad, stylus, 1-hour battery. No matter how good the idea, if you don't iterate and improve it, if will fail.

After making prototype, use the same concept or if needed add some more innovative ideas to make the real product, go through the different testing techniques and get the best result, and finally use this result to make the real applicable product .

Innovation is great... But the environmental and societal impact of it should be considered. Cost to the society is more important and should not be always profit centric.

All the other steps are important but this is probably the most important. Team members creativity should be celebrated and rewarded with things that are valuable to them. A happy and satisfied employee is more likely to be innovative.

we can start to talk about this when management started to respect engineers. maybe need CEO with engineering/technical background to ease the feedbacks. ko ingat cina kayo2 tu nak ke belajar technical..pigilaa

By encouraging open communication, embracing diverse perspectives, and creating a supportive environment where team members feel empowered to share ideas without fear of criticism. Organize brainstorming sessions or idea-sharing meetings where everyone's input is valued, regardless of their position or experience level. Additionally, promoting a culture of experimentation and risk-taking encourages team members to explore new approaches and solutions. Providing resources and support for professional development and continuing education also helps team members stay updated on the latest technologies and methodologies, fostering a culture of innovation.

Hello everyone, I’d like to add a quick comment about the importance of benchmarking and market intelligence versus innovation. Learning what the competition is doing (patents, products, strategy) is also a way to generate novel ideas and search for a competitive advantage. It goes without saying that intellectual property must be strictly respected even when feeling inspired by existing technologies ! Regards, Bruno

Promover inovação na equipe requer um ambiente colaborativo, diversidade de pensamento, recursos para pesquisa, reconhecimento de ideias inovadoras, treinamento e processo de implementação claro.

Foster collaboration among team members by encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation and sharing of ideas. Collaboration can lead to the combination of different perspectives and expertise, sparking innovation.

Ensure you bring new things to the table through continuous. research on given subject of consideration. Carry every member of the team along by giving them responsibility to help the team to succeed. Provide financial support to members of the team who are holding on tenaciously to the vision of bring new things to the table to succeed. Every success made by team should be dedicated to all team members.