Engineering Innovation is a Team Sport

As I write this, The Ohio State University Buckeyes just beat Oregon in the College Football Playoff National Championship. Being from Ohio, it was mandatory to stay up and watch the game. It was an impressive display of athleticism, but something Ohio State’s quarterback, Cardale Jones, said after the game got me thinking about the value of collaboration to design engineers.

At the beginning of the season, Jones was the third-string quarterback. He was thrust into the starting role after the team lost its first- and second-string quarterbacks to injuries. The championship game was only Jones’ third college start, so naturally many people wondered if he would crack under the pressure. In a post-game interview with confetti falling across the field to celebrate Ohio State’s victory, he was asked how he had kept the moment from “getting too big.”

“I knew I didn’t have to do too much,” Jones said. He put faith in his team.

We often write about the increasingly intense pressures faced by design engineers. You’re expected to continually innovate while employing ever-changing technologies across various engineering disciplines in tighter and tighter product design cycles. It’s all on you, or is it?

Drafting Your Team

With today’s complex product design requirements, no one person, one department or even one company needs to be solely responsible for creating innovative products. If you’re feeling that pressure, it may be because you don’t have a team in place, or a team that works the way it should. Even larger companies, with their global networks of suppliers, don’t always collaborate as well as they might.

Why? A corporate culture that rewards individual effort rather than teamwork could be to blame in some cases, but the solution may be as simple as expanding your team to include people with diverse backgrounds and resources. That’s the idea behind the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI).

The NNMI will consist of regional hubs of private industry, academic and government representatives working together to accelerate manufacturing technologies. While a bill to create such a network—The Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation (RAMI) Act—was not making much progress in Congress, President Obama used executive orders over the past two years to launch five innovation hubs. In December, RAMI was finally signed into law as part of the omnibus spending bill. It funds the expansion of the NNMI to include 15 hubs.

The latest hub, the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI), was officially launched last month via a $259 million investment. The Department of Energy and a consortium of 122 companies, nonprofits and universities led by the University of Tennessee-Knoxville made the investment, more than $189 million of which came from non-federal funds. IACMI’s goal is to develop low-cost, high-production, energy-efficient manufacturing and recycling processes for composites.

Get Involved

While the details surrounding how to participate in IACMI are still being worked out, it may follow the lead of the first innovation hub, America Makes, which launched in 2012 to advance 3D printing. America Makes has three levels of membership and has engaged non-members with project calls that award funding to address a particular challenge, an online forum and a member matching service to promote collaboration.

The other innovation hubs that have already been established have similar collaboration opportunities. They include the Next Generation Power Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute headquartered at North Carolina State University, the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute based in Chicago and the Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation Institute based in Detroit. The other NNMI hubs supported by the recent passage of RAMI have yet to be named. They will go through a selection process, but will likely include similar opportunities for engagement.

The idea of public-private partnerships is not new, of course. Perhaps the most high-profile arrangement can be seen in NASA’s work with private companies to launch missions to the International Space Station. We also feature two public-private partnerships benefitting design engineers in this issue.

There are many ways to build a better team and innovate via collaboration, whether from federal initiatives like NNMI or smaller partnerships that tap into municipal and local academic resources. The key is to recognize the value of collaboration and work toward building a team you can rely upon.