Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING AROUND THE WORLDence, engineering and management has been a major factorin our academic excellence, our cultural richness and oureconomic success (close to 60 per cent of engineering PhDdegrees awarded annually are currently earned by foreignnationals. 94 Foreign nationals residing in the United Stateswere named as inventors or co-inventors in 24.2 per cent ofthe patent applications filed from the United States in 2006,up from 7.3 per cent in 1998). 95Global challenges to engineering practice, research andeducation in the U.S.The United States has long been a leader in engineering education,especially at the graduate level, and certainly in the qualityand accomplishment of our research universities overall. Ithas been one of the world’s most technologically innovativenations thanks, in large part, to the quality and productivity ofits engineering workforce. However, several factors are changingrapidly in the twenty-first century.The last half of the twentieth century was dominated by physics,electronics, high-speed communications and high-speedlong-distance transportation. It was an age of speed andpower. The twenty-first century appears already to be quitedifferent. It is increasingly dominated by biology and information,but also by macro-scale issues around energy, water andsustainability. These are issues that should be strengths of U.S.engineers, but the context is rapidly evolving.The impact of R&D expendituresThe U.S. once had the highest national expenditure on R&D,but today North America, Europe and Asia account for aboutone-third of the world’s R&D expenditure each. The U.S. islosing ‘market share’ in every quantitative category used toevaluate R&D. From 1986 to 2003, the U.S. share of global R&Dspending dropped by 9 per cent. The U.S. dropped its shareof scientific publications by 8 per cent, its share of new of scienceand engineering Bachelor’s degrees by 10 per cent, itsshare of U.S. patents by 2 per cent and it dropped its share ofnew science and engineering PhDs by 30 per cent. The countrygraduates about 60,000 bachelor-level engineers per year,where China is now graduating about 250,000 per year. Thesechanges reflect the global success of many other countries andwe celebrate such advances. But the U.S. is recognizing that wemust continue to innovate and develop our engineering andtechnology sectors as a nation.Global production of engineersThe rise of production of engineers globally is tremendous.For example, China now educates about 250,000 bachelorlevelengineers per year while the U.S. graduates about 60,000.94 American Society for Engineering Education95 Wadhwa, Vivek, Gary Gereffi, Ben Rissing, and Ryan Ong. 2007. Where the engineersare. Issues in Science and Technology, Vol. 23, No.3 (Spring), pp. 73–84.Certainly, there are definitional and quality differences, andnumbers aren’t everything, but Floyd Kvamme, a highly experiencedhigh-tech venture capitalist, says that, ‘venture capitalis the search for smart engineers.’ Therefore, for example, theU.S. needs to address the fact that fewer than 15 per cent ofhigh school graduates have a sufficient math and science backgroundto even have the option of entering engineering school.Speed and changing nature of innovationThe pace of change in innovation is also presenting new challenges.Engineers must work and innovate at ever-acceleratingrates. When the automobile was introduced into the market, ittook fifty-five years – essentially a lifetime – until one quarterof U.S households owned one. It took about twenty-two yearsuntil one-quarter of U.S. households owned a radio. The Internetachieved this penetration in about eight years. Such accelerationdrives an inexhaustible thirst for innovation and producescompetitive pressures. The spread of education and technologyaround the world magnifies these competitive pressures.Finally, globalization is also changing the way engineering workis organized and the way companies acquire innovation. Today,service sector employment is approaching 70 per cent of the U.S.workforce. The development and execution of IT-based serviceprojects is usually accomplished by dividing the functions intoa dozen or so components, each of which is carried out by adifferent group of engineers and managers. These groups arelikely to be in several different locations around the world. Inthe manufacturing sector, this new distribution of work is evenmore dramatic. For example, the new Boeing 787 aeroplanereportedly has 132,500 engineered parts that are produced in545 global locations. Indeed, the Chief Executive Officer of globalIT firm IBM, Sam Palmasano, says that we have now movedbeyond ‘multinational corporations’ to ‘globally integratedenterprises’. An emerging element of this evolving engineeringcontext is ‘open innovation’, where companies no longerlook solely within themselves for innovation, nor do they justpurchase it by acquiring small companies. Today, they obtaininnovation wherever it is found – in other companies, in othercountries, or even through arrangements with competitors. But,more and more often, U.S. engineers are finding themselves incompetition for work with engineers from other countries whoare often paid far less than what U.S. engineers expect to earn.Working in this evolving context requires a nimble new kind ofengineer and engineering organization.More and more often, U.S. engineers are finding themselvesin competition for work with engineers from other countries,and these other engineers are often paid far less – in somecountries as little as one-fifth the rate of U.S. engineers. To dowell in this environment, U.S. engineers not only need the sortsof analytic skills, high-level design, systems thinking and creativeinnovation that are normally provided in the current edu-237