Mentoring the Workforce of the Future: The Emerging Technologies Summer Student Program

Mentoring the Workforce of the Future: The Emerging Technologies Summer Student Program

The classic conception of an intern is a minion who brings people coffee, fixes printer jams, and does grunt work. The interns hired by MITRE’s Emerging Technologies Department, however, are not minions. They are student investigators charged with helping to solve overwhelming societal problems. Read profiles of four of these interns and their summer work in the public interest.

Creativity: Where Art and Engineering Meet

Creativity: Where Art and Engineering Meet

At first glance, creativity might seem like the ability to make something from nothing. That isn’t actually true, but creativity does require an active imagination and the ability to judge what, among all the imagined things, might have value, given what you’re trying to accomplish. Creativity in engineering and in the arts requires the ability to generate a wide variety of ideas that relate to the goals of the effort, often the more ideas the better. Judgment is then used to evaluate the merits and flaws of each idea.

Dimensions of Collaborative Innovation

Dimensions of Collaborative Innovation

A recent discussion with colleagues on intriguing approaches and paths to innovation triggered my systems thinking habits – to explore and understand challenges systemically. What I ended up discovering were multiple dimensions of innovation, particularly for collaborative innovation.

Preparing for the Future by Knowing How to Take a Punch

Preparing for the Future by Knowing How to Take a Punch

Most organizations typically plan for one type of opponent (one future) even though a better approach would be preparing for multiple opponents (multiple futures), building in the much-needed resiliency. One approach that helps build this resiliency into organization is Strategic Foresight, an approach developed by Herman Kahn in the 1950s to help the US contemplate and plan for various outcomes of the Cold War including Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) using applications from game theory.

Interview with Awais Sheikh on Deciphering Business Process Innovation

Interview with Awais Sheikh on Deciphering Business Process Innovation

Awais Sheikh is the Capability Steward for Business Innovation here at MITRE. In this episode Awais helps us decipher a fundamental question for any organization on a mission to better the world. When you get past the hype, what is the real meaning of innovation? And perhaps more importantly, how can we get past the jargon so we can make a lasting, positive impact?

Eureka Café

Eureka Café

In this post, Howard Gershen describes how he managed Samuel Johnson’s feat of making “new things familiar, and familiar things new” for colleagues with discriminating palates. Best part of his approach is that you can try it right away, adjusting, of course, to the...

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