Enhancing creativity is an indispensable goal of many engineering courses. However, with flourishment of global collaboration in various engineering classrooms and best educational practices being replicated across cultures, there are not many curriculum interventions that originate from students' diverse cultural needs. When cultural differences are ignored, students may get culturally biased grades and face confusion and difficulties. For instance, the notion of "disruption" and "breakthrough" in product design innovation is culturally and locally shaped in the U.S. and might be considered undesirable in Japan. For example, Japanese students coming to a U.S. university for a co-final presentation with their U.S. student partners may get ill-evaluated due to lack of articulation on how their ideas break through the status quo. This is problematic given that student evaluation is less based on traditional exams of fundamental science knowledge, but rather increasingly subject to culturally-shaped experience.The paper is centered around the idea that engineers are motivated by the cultural values with which they identify. In the U.S., the motivation to promote change is widely held to underpin the generation of new ideas and value creation. In contrast, preservation is perceived as demanding but taken very seriously in Japan and change from this perspective can be seen as an unconstrained, irresponsible mission that requires less effort.The paper empirically examines the cultural dimensions of creativity in engineering education, specifically how engineering students' motivations for creative problem-solving are different in the U.S. than in Japan. A cross-cultural survey study was designed and run to test the hypothesis that Japanese (U.S.) engineers are more (less) motivated to create new ideas when they are asked to preserve rather than change something. We will share the encouraging preliminary results and discuss implications. Engineers across different cultures have the capacity of both -create to change, and create to preserve. But different cultures emphasize different values. If engineering educators (and managers at organizations) of a certain sociocultural context celebrate their cultural values and restrict others, either consciously or not, this would put people with different values at disadvantage. With the salient power dynamics between educators (managers) and students (junior employees), this means alienation, misjudgment and disconnection. The paper underlies the importance for educators to learn about the different cultural forces behind different engineering behaviors. The research contributes to the cross-cultural literature of engineering education.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to first suggest scanning focal areas in new product development (NPD) by comparing with design thinking and, second, to uncover what people in different occupations expect of NPD based on future scenarios. Design/methodology/approach Authors place scanning and design thinking into a matrix of product-market strategies. In addition, this study adopts several open-end-type questionnaire surveys of employees at Japanese companies who have taken part in idea generation workshops that take a medium- to long-term perspective. Findings Authors found that innovations generated through scanning can cover the most difficult and uncertain areas in practice compared with design thinking. This manuscript also reveals occupational categories can be divided into two groups according to different expectations of NPD: the rapid-fire NPD expectation group and late-bloomer NPD expectation group. The former group which consists of marketing and engineering experts tends to expect that NPD is simply a response to existing needs and that profit will be gained expeditiously through NPD, while the latter, which comprising design and research experts, tends to expect that NPD will realize future innovations. Originality/value This study shows some common and different points between scanning and design thinking by using a theoretical framework of product-market strategies. Also, this study reveals who will lead innovation based on foresight in business.

To understand the characteristics of ASEAN countries that are conducive to unique innovation, a series of idea generation and selection experiments were conducted in three emerging countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, which were compared with one developed country, Japan. The experiments consisted of one-day-workshops held in each of the four countries. Two significant differences were found between emerging and developed countries. First, participants from the ASEAN countries proposed ideas that entailed a lower investment risk than did the Japanese participants. Secondly, the ASEAN participants were more confident in their idea selection than the Japanese participants were. The results suggested new possibilities for the development of strategies encouraging collaboration between emerging and developed countries in innovation management.

No abstract

This paper is an attempt to gain better insight into design thinking from a micro-viewpoint through the association of design thinking with human beings' personality traits. Based on previous research, we conjecture that personality traits are also associated with the capacity for utilizing design thinking. To test our hypothesis, we focused on the five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by the d.school and utilized FFM (Five-Factor Model) to describe personalities. 28 students, who have experiences of design thinking activities, participated in the study. We used correlation analysis and observed the significant relationship between personality traits and individuals' capacity for utilizing design thinking.