Academic validation of the Innovation Engineering program for use by CIRAS and other MEP centers for increasing innovation in American companies

The Innovation Engineering (IE) program, organized by inventor Doug Hall, is an educational workshop that presents methods and strategies to improve innovation. The Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program, a division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), uses this training for their consultants at MEP-funded centers across the United States. The IE program provides insightful recommendations to encourage the success of innovations with three main categories: Create, Communicate, and Commercialize. The most substantial of these categories is the Create category, which provides tools for generating new ideas. The Communicate category lists techniques for effectively communicating these ideas to others, and the Commercialize category offers advice for ensuring that the innovation is worth the financial investment required to produce it. However, the IE program does not provide peer-reviewed sources to substantiate these suggestions. This thesis serves as a compiled a collection of experimental treatments in academic literature that investigate the effectiveness of the methods proposed by the IE program. This paper provides a review of the academic literature that supports, and in a few cases refutes, the techniques taught by the IE program. Some additional methods, complementary to the recommendations of IE, are also included.