Comparative Study on Collaborative Innovation Practices for Excavating Innovation Potentials of Undergraduates in Engineering

How to excavate innovation potentials of undergraduates is always a key issue in engineering education system, especially through collaborative innovation practices. In present research, four representative groups with 4-5 members for each group, named as J01, J03, J04, and J12 respectively, are followed and studied for more than three years, from freshman year to senior year. When focusing on the relationship between member contributions and group harvests, the following conclusions can be drawn from the view point of achieving innovative results. Firstly, preferably in the initial stage, it is essential to decide on an innovative topic of high feasibility with constant efforts by both arguments and adjustments. Secondly, preferably throughout the whole timeline, it is necessary to dynamically recruit talented members of differentiation in both knowledge structures and professional skills for optimizing the group composition. Finally, it is most significantly to lead a group of all members with a common goal, full of passion and conviction in digging underlying scientific points out, rather than being content with short-term gains. In the follow-up work, we will make use of other scientific methods to keep this study on-going with increasing the data samples and extending the research periods.