EPDE2012/5093
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION
6 & 7 SEPTEMBER 2012, ARTESIS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, ANTWERP, BELGIUM
HOT POTATOES AND DOUBLE DIAMOND IN A
WHIZ: CAN TECHNIQUES AND PROCESSES REALLY
LEAD TO INNOVATION?
Chris D
D
O
O
W
W
L
L
E
E
N
N
London South Bank University
ABSTRACT
The paper introduces a brief student project that was carried out with a large number of groups of
students from engineering and design backgrounds. This was intended to provide the students with an
experience of developing innovative ideas from the pre-idea position to the stage of putting forward
concrete proposals for action.
The paper relays the experience of running such a project and its benefits, but then asks the questions
of how close it came to achieving its goal of getting students involved in an innovation process.
Innovation would seem to require three conditions for it to exist. The first is a significantly different
idea: the second is an environment that nurtures the idea and the third is the society that is prepared to
take up and disseminate the embodied idea. The small six-week project aims to provide some
techniques that make the achievement of these criteria more likely. It resulted in changed behaviour
from some students but for significant innovation to take place a longer period needs to be used to
develop and nurture it.
Keywords: Innovation, group projects, techniques
1 INTRODUCTION
The paper concerns the implementation of a final year module in innovation and enterprise taught to a
large selection of engineering and design students.
During a curriculum development programme it was proposed that a common final year module in
innovation and enterprise be written across all engineering and design disciplines at London South
Bank University. This meant that a varied group of students took the module from courses as diverse
as Product Design, Mechanical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Computer Systems and
Networks Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Civil Engineering, Architectural Engineering and
Chemical Engineering. Some disciplines were focused on technicalities within their area: others took a
broader brush approach. Most students were on courses leading to IEng or partial CEng exemption.
Meeting UK Engineering Council requirements meant that the module had to clearly meet a number of
specific requirements, namely:
Knowledge and understanding of the commercial and economic context of engineering processes.
Understanding of management and business practises to achieve engineering design objectives
including finance, law, marketing, personnel and quality.
Understanding and application of IPR, including patent application and nature of associated legal
and contractual issues.
Ability to use creativity to establish innovative engineering design solutions, justifying the
selection of ideas.
Ability to generate ideas to solve problems and design new products, systems, components or
processes, synthesising from those already in existence.
This was to provide students with practical experience and skills in innovation and enterprise by
carrying out the processes rather than investigating and researching case studies. This is recommended
by people such as David Baume [1] who suggests learning objectives might better be construed as
developing ‘doing’ type skills rather than 'writing about' or 'researching' skills. As such, the prime
requirements were to do innovation and to do enterprise.
EPDE2012/5093
2 M
M
O
O
D
D
U
U
L
L
E
E
O
O
R
R
G
G
A
A
N
N
I
I
S
S
A
A
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
:
:
T
T
H
H
E
E
A
A
S
S
S
S
I
I
G
G
N
N
M
M
E
E
N
N
T
T
W
W
O
O
R
R
K
K
Module assessment was split into two parts: the first concentrated on innovation, and was a group
piece of work, whilst the second focused on enterprise and was carried out by individual students.
This paper focuses on the first assignment. For this students investigated current ‘hot potatoes’ – ie
current discussion topics for which there was either a lack of consensus of opinion, no easy answer, or
several possible and equally plausible responses.
2.1 Hot Potatoes
They were asked to reframe the problem and then come up with a direction for action for resolving the
issue. The suggestion was that innovation was required in these areas in order to move the state of the
art onwards in a different direction. Typical problems that students chose as hot potatoes were things
such as how to generate sufficient alternative energy, how to deal with the issues surrounding the tar
sands of Alberta, what’s going wrong with religion and why students drop out of university. Some
groups were unable to see past the edges of their disciplines: others chose topics that were a significant
distance from their specialist areas and stretched the elastic between topic and engineering or design.
2.2 Techniques for Innovation
Students were asked to carry out a number of specific techniques and to apply these to generate
innovative answers to the broad question that they were to investigate.
The process included using a number of techniques including ‘timeboxing’, ‘double diamond’,
‘Innowiz’, affinity diagrams, Ideo cards and pecha kucha and to present solutions that demonstrated
coherent plans for action.
2.2.1 Double Diamond
The first one of these was a ‘Double Diamond’ technique or process. This splits up a problem solving
exercise into two parts, each described as a diamond. The Design Council [2] refers to the four stages
as Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. The first part of each diamond is a broadening phase, and
the second an assessment or closing down phase. Two such diamonds make up the problem-solving
process: the first identifies and defines the problem and the second solves the problem. A horizontal
line was added after the second diamond to indicate the communication of the problem.
Students selected an initial, broad topic, expanding it by describing it in as many different ways as
possible. They then took the alternative descriptions and definitions, and assessed them in the second
stage of the diamond, to result in a well-defined problem statement that they could then develop in the
next stage of the process. This was to find as many different solutions to the problem statement as
possible, followed by a closing down stage where the decision is made between the myriad of
possibilities. This results in a single proposal for action. The last part (technically outside the Double
Diamond) was to communicate the process the group had been through and the action proposal.
2.2.2 Timeboxing
The second technique that was used, and can be seen in the Figure 1, is that of timeboxing. This is a
technique developed from a combination of management methods and agile computing methods. The
concept is extremely simple, in that a goal is set for a specific time period and a (brief) report given at
the end of the time period.
In some cases, timeboxes, as they are known, can be short periods, such as that developed in the 1980s
by Francesco Cirillo as the Pomodoro Technique [3] with 25 minute periods, or longer ones such as
those given to the students in this example where they were meeting together at weekly intervals. One
could argue that such a basic time management tool could never be described as novel: simply that it
comes with different names attached to determine a different, perhaps more trendy, incarnation. For
instance, the corollary to Parkinson’s Law [4] postulates that getting a task successfully completed is
done more effectively by delegating the task to someone who is busy. Part of the argument is that they
will have successfully carried out timeboxing techniques and will be able determine exactly when the
task might be completed, but Parkinson, in his tongue in cheek manner, then goes on to say that the
busy person will (successfully) delegate the work to his secretary.
EPDE2012/5093
Figure 1. Double diamond and timeboxing
2.2.3 Innowiz
A third technique, or rather series of techniques, is represented by the Innowiz set of methods [5]. The
Innowiz website [6] is simply an open-source collection of pointers to proprietary innovation
techniques and processes collated into four categories: Problem Definition, Idea Generation, Idea
Selection and Idea Communication. Conveniently, these four categories each have separate colour
schemes of magenta, yellow, cyan and black.
Under the Problem Definition category there are 23 methods: under the Idea Generation heading as
many as 47: Idea Selection has 19 and Idea Communication has 26 – a total of 115 methods
altogether. Student groups were asked to use this tool (or any other tool, for that matter) and identify
the methods they were using to develop their double diamond processes.
2.2.4 Pecha kucha
They were also required to use a particular technique for presenting their work: that of a pecha kucha
presentation [7]. This technique utilises a timed PowerPoint presentation, with 20 slides each taking
20 seconds: it is sometimes known by the alternative title of 20/20 presentation as a result. Although
the recommendation is that pecha kuchas are based around the use of picture language, this was not a
requirement of this particular exercise.
Figure 2. Innowiz.be headline pictures
EPDE2012/5093
2.3 Outcomes from groups
An example of the sort of problem tackled is shown in Figure 3. This particular group was tackling the
broad topics of energy – current energy usage and the future of energy production. Their more specific
search question was “How can renewable energies fill the short to mid-term gap in electricity
generation?” Figure 3 shows part of their presentation where they were showing a fact-finding process
– simply asking about the current energy position (left) and the British Government’s proposals for
2020 on the right. They put forward a specific proposal for the conversion of fossil fuel generation
sites into biomass converted sites, particularly where these were due to be closed due to legislation.
Figure 3. An example of a slide used by one of the groups of students
Of the methods contained within the Innowiz system, those that students found most promising were
wordless, Wikimind maps, decision matrices, chart chooser and affinity diagrams.
Figure 4. Students carrying out an affinity diagram exercise [8]
1%
6%
22%
31%
UKENERGYGENERATION
Source: DECC
EPDE2012/5093
Student groups who performed best said that the processes were fun and useful, giving them sets of
methods that could be usefully transferred into a work setting. Industry based students found them
particularly useful.
3 CONDITIONS FOR INNOVATION
NESTA produced a report in 2009 that determined that seven wider conditions were necessary for
effective innovation. These are public research, openness, entrepreneurship, demand, competition,
access to finance and skills[9]. Their model includes four areas and the connections between them and
is seen in Figure 5.
Mobilising
resources
Selection
Knowledge
creation
Skills
Accessto
finance
Competition
Demand
Openness
Public
research
finan
Keyfunctionalstepsintheinnovationprocess
Keyrelatedframeworkconditionsforinnovation
Entrepreneurship
Figure 5. The innovation process as described by NESTA.
However, the descriptions do not read like conditions but might best be described as areas of concern
that relate to innovation. A more coherent list might include three conditions, viz:
an idea that is worthwhile
an incubation system that can grow, embody, develop and spread the idea and
a society that is prepared to be changed by the embodiment of the idea.
The NESTA areas can be identified as being within and related to one of these conditions. Thus the
worthwhile idea includes the idea generation aspects of entrepreneurship and public research plus the
selection processes, the incubation system is found in the access to finance and skills and the society
that is prepared to be changed includes the openness, the demand and competition. The NESTA
approach tends to presuppose the existence of business systems and a public, whereas the three-part
list would function effectively if the innovation consisted of, say, a language change that was
promoted via a television commercial or an effective political development.
3.1 Project critique
What would then be needed to help crystalise the innovation evident in this short project might be the
inclusion of something like a hothousing process to support and nurture the ideas that were presented
and then some means of placing them in such a way that society would be able to benefit from them
and be changed. To make this third step more likely, techniques included in the INNOWIZ collection
include such things as market research and trend analysis, aimed at the development of questions that
could then stand a greater chance of becoming successful innovations. There are also techniques that
cover the presentation of the ideas within the techniques and these techniques could enable the best of
the concepts to be disseminated beyond the confines of the six-week period and be presented to
appropriate parts of society.