Are you ready to innovate? Engineering students’ perception of their skills to innovate

This article aims to explore the self-perception of engineering students about their skills to innovate. We investigate what skills they need to innovate and to what extent they feel they are sufficiently well trained in their engineering school to work innovatively in their future career. Based on a recent literature revue, we point out the essential skills required to innovate. We applied a methodology of sequential exploratory approach including at the first phase a preliminary exploratory study and a quantitative online survey at the second phase. Our results indicate that open mindedness; objective outlook and creativity are perceived as the most important for innovation activities. Surprisingly, half of the surveyed engineering students declared that they feel not to be sufficiently well trained to innovate. We found for several soft skills such as creativity, objective outlook, critical thinking and open mindedness an important divergence between their training and their perceived importance. On the contrary, for hard skills like knowledge, technical expertise and experience our results show a particularly good convergence. Our results suggest that better integration of soft skills to innovate in the engineering curriculum would be beneficial.