José Figueiredo

Strategy and technology management: An innovation-leader case study

This paper studies a Portuguese academic start-up company, an acknowledged innovation leader in its sector, in two critical phases of its strategic development: • the founding of the company by a group of successful university engineering researchers in 2000 • its bid for internationalization in 2010.

Engineering practice - inputs for course design

This paper presents empirical data from a study of the practice of recently graduated engineers working in Portugal and situates the findings in ongoing work to find an appropriate model to categorize the practice of engineering professionals and to draw out useful conclusions for the design of engineering courses and the competences to be developed in them.

Engineering project, a sociotechnicalperspective in engineering education

Certainly apprehensive with how things go in academia concerning engineering project education we observed and analysed different learning settings, in engineering schools and companies, by discussing with different actors (academic community, teachers, pedagogical and scientific board elements, practitioners, and students). We explored some alternative approaches to dominant teaching/learning paradigms, and we concluded for simple general recommendations to engineering project contexts. The goal of our research is to make explicit a specific paradigm, an integrated way of looking into engineering practice and engineering learning, focusing on engineering project contexts. Internalizing lessons from practice and academic papers we deploy a way of doing in class that can be explored as active learning, namingly project-based learning. The main advantage of our proposed approach is that learning occurs by doing and it occurs almost as a sub-product of doing. In fact we envisage mix goals in our approach. One is performing, executing and obtaining tangible results in engineering projects design and development; the second one is a by-product and it is learning, enriching students own dynamic capabilities, and make them internalize tacit and explicit knowledge about the work experienced. We use a reflective practitioner approach, combined with lessons learned. Of course the effectiveness of this model resides in the alignment and conciliation of the two goals, which implies mature stuff and mature students.

Learning Engineering Through Teams

Certainly apprehensive with how things go in academia concerning engineering project education we observed and analysed different learning settings, either in engineering schools and companies, by discussing with different actors (academic community, teachers, pedagogical and scientific board elements, students). We exercised some alternative approaches to distinct learning paradigms, and we concluded for simple general recommendations that can be placed in practice in academia and companies, in engineering project contexts. The goal of our research is to make explicit a specific paradigm, an integrated way of looking into engineering practice and engineering learning, mainly in engineering projects context. Internalizing lessons from this alternative paradigm we deploy a way of doing in class that can be explored as active learning and project-based learning. The main advantage of our proposed approach is that learning occurs by doing and, we would say more importantly, learning occurs almost as a sub-product of doing. And in fact there are mix goals in our approach. One is performing, and obtaining results in engineering project design and development, the second one is a by-product and it is learning, enriching its own dynamic capabilities, and internalizing tacit and explicit knowledge about the work experienced. Of course the effectiveness of this model resides in the alignment of the two goals, which implies mature stuff and mature students almost about taking their master degree.

Interaction in the engineering workplace: Examining a network of actors representation

The paper presents a grounded theory model of engineering practice and describes how a theoretical model was obtained through the application of the Gioia Methodology to interviews of engineering practitioners. It then presents data on workplace interaction obtained from an online survey of 247 engineers and shows how the data obtained support propositions derived from the theoretical model.

L'ingénierie hétérogène portugaise: À la découverte de solutions viables

En appliquant le concept de John Law d’ingenierie heterogene a l’etude de l’activite d’ingenierie au Portugal, l’article montre que l’interaction sociotechnique represente une part importante de l’activite journaliere des ingenieurs. Utilisant une methodologie mixte (un mix de differentes methodes d’analyse), l’enquete suggere que le cœur de l’activite des ingenieurs consiste a trouver des solutions viables, generalement grâce aux negociations et a la coordination de flux d’information et d’acteurs en contextes technologiques. Les auteurs suggerent que la formation de futurs ingenieurs doit se projeter au-dela de l’approche ingenierie/sciences, en developpant des competences sociotechniques. Ces competences sont essentielles pour l’activite technique elle-meme, mais aussi pour l’activite de coordination. [1]

Portuguese engineering practice: Two empirical studies and a 15 th century perspective

In his much-cited book, Engineering Education, John Heywood argues that engineering educators need to have a defensible epistemology on which to base their teaching. As a contribution to the epistemological study of the scope of engineering practice the authors compare two empirical studies of Portuguese engineering. The first of these was carried out with the support of the Ordem dos Engenheiros and appeared as a book published in Portuguese in 1999. The second study appeared as a chapter in an internationally published book on Global Engineering Practice in 2013. Focusing on the sociotechnical aspects of engineering, the authors indicate common points in the findings of the two studies and set them in the context of research into sociotechnical interaction of engineers in other national contexts. In addition the two contemporary studies are further contextualized by an actor network representation based on the concept of heterogeneous engineering developed by sociologist John Law to describe the technological development found in 15th century Portuguese maritime expansion. The authors conclude that engineering educators would benefit from awarding more importance to the sociotechnical aspects of engineering practice when setting out the competences to be acquired in engineering courses.

Cross-functional emerging domains in engineering design: actor-networks and collaborative models, organizational learning and knowledge management

In this topic presentation we visit some of the positions that, being in minority, claim to dispute a growing role in technological systems design and development. The increasing complexity of technology, the widespread of technological use, and some recent discovers in neurosciences, deludes the boundaries between technology and its uses. ANT, interpretive approaches, qualitative methods, collaborative models, knowledge management and some reasoning among different research paradigms were the original setup for this topic (4.1 and 4.2). The submitted papers to subtopic 4.1 was not aligned, so we had a choice: either not accepting the papers submitted to this subtopic because they were out of scope, or accept them if they had the quality to be accepted. We choose the second. But as the subtopic stayed almost uncovered we explain in this short presentation what we had in mind when we opened it.