A Strategic Engineering Management Approach to Innovation and Organizational Sustainability: An Addition to the Engineering Management Curriculum?

The Baldrige National Performance Excellence Criteria (2013 -2014)(1) places increased emphasis on organizational sustainability in terms of societal, environmental, and financial impacts; and innovation as a discontinuous change in engineering designs and/or business models. Such concepts may become important considerations for engineering managers in today's global marketplace. Engineering management educators may become a major player in transforming compliance with performance specifications into an enhanced competitive business advantage by offering a total systems approach to managing innovation while ensuring the long term viability of the business itself. Throughout this article the authors use the Baldrige definition of sustainability/organizational sustainability as cited above. However, from the Engineering Management perspective care must be taken to acknowledge that sustainability in the engineering profession often focuses on the environmental component of the triple bottom line as is true for "leadership in energy and environmental design". The business literature often speaks of "a sustainable competitive advantage" underscoring the marketing and financial aspects. The total systems approach suggested in this article takes a strategic engineering approach to conducting trade-offs to determine impacts of alternative strategies that might place different levels of importance on the components of sustainability given in the Baldridge definition. The applied research presented in this paper provides a conceptual framework for translating strategy into implementation results via a modified Plan - Do - Check - Act Shewhart / Deming improvement opportunity identification and corrective action closed loop management cycle. The framework given in Figure 1 has proven effective in introducing discontinuous innovations in an engineering technology business and has three best practices embedded that have enhanced internal efficiencies as well.