Creating Value
What You Need to Know About Creating Value
Creating Value is a component of the entrepreneurial mindset. It is the third of what we call the 3C’s (Curiosity, Connections, Creating Value).
The increasing complexity of the challenges facing our world tells us that engineers must be outstanding problem solvers, designers, and value creators in a variety of settings.
Teaching your students the importance of creating value helps redirect their mindset and motivation so their engineering solutions become more impactful.
But what is value?
Value can be economic. It can also be social, societal, personal - and likely is a blend of some or all of these elements. Engineers with an eye toward value creation understand stakeholder needs, learn from failure, and habitually work to provide benefits while understanding the consequences of their actions.
Community-Created Resources
Solutions, designs, and systems need to solve real problems and provide benefits to a variety of stakeholders. Use this starter pack of resources shared by faculty:
Creating Value
What do we mean?
Solution Success
Going beyond problem solving
Capstone Value
Design begins with a need
Matrix Approach
To defining value
More Resources
Creating Value: Unexpected Opportunities
Value creation often comes from seeing unexpected opportunities in everyday life. One such example started with a bowl of salad and a question, "Can human heart muscle grow on spinach leaves?"
The answer is yes!
Dr. Glenn Gaudette, Professor of Engineering at Boston College, had an aha moment at lunch when looking at a spinach leaf. His desire to create value for society led to a major medical and scientific breakthrough merging biological kingdoms to grow human heart cells to fight heart disease.
How can faculty create value in the classroom?
Creating value goes beyond problem solving. Engineering education often focuses on quantitative skills. However, solutions to many of the most challenging problems require higher level design, entrepreneurial mindset, and value creation skills.
Help establish value creation as a habitual part of a graduate’s mindset and as an instinctual driver by designing exercises so that students:
- Become empathetic ethnographers, or observers of unmet needs
- Habitually reframe problems as opportunities
- Ask questions that reveal authentic demand
- Develop archetype users of engineering solutions
- Offer solutions to problems, testing novel ideas with others to obtain formative feedback
- Create value from underutilized resources
- Extend existing solutions to new situations
More Mindset Learning
Curiosity
The first "C"
