First of all, let's start by stating that we're not discussing the topic of how to be more innovative with Systems Engineering - Innovation Engineering is focused around the question as to how people and organizations can become more innovative, consistently.

Consistency implies a standardized approach and perhaps that's not entirely possible in this realm, however methodology can still be applied to the endeavor. The "engineering" part of the title relates to the specific approaches that can be used to apply that methodology happen. We will be looking at a wide variety of case studies, from the DoD to Hollywood, from agriculture to IT - Innovation is not limited to any one field and the approaches applied to achieve re in many cases applicable across all of these functional domains.

Concept Engineering

To a large extent IT and Web 2.0 is all about engineering virtual worlds or realities; those worlds are made up of representative code with user-friendly interfaces. While there is of course technology behind all of this, both business development and systems engineering starts at the conceptual level. Conceptual engineering occurs at nearly every stage in the business lifecycle, however it is most important in the initial strategic phases. It can include many of the following elements:

• Brainstorming
• Research & Analysis
• Modeling & Mapping
• Ontology Development
• What-if Validation