In what ways do members of your team come up with new ideas? By keeping their eyes wide-open.
By travelling.
By learning from what other people have done, and then asking “what would happen if we adapted it a bit?”.
By working with their hands.
By talking to each other.
By listening to the user.
By never being satisfied with the first answer, or even the 100th.
What qualities do you think are needed to solve an engineering problem? Sub-conscious technical knowledge….if it’s too near the surface you fall into the classical engineering problem of focussing too much on the detail.
You need to like other people, and want to do good for humanity and the planet.
You need to be able to think in 3 and 4 dimensions all the time.
You need to develop confidence, and so you mustn’t fear failure but learn from it.
How important is it to you and your team to know what other engineers are doing? Very…after a few years some of it becomes codified eg in British Standards, but the broad spectrum stuff is simply there to be experienced and learned from.
