The Engineering Change Lab brings 40 senior leaders together from multiple organizational bodies. Drawing on these perspectives, we identify challenges and pursue opportunities for innovation.
Redefining the role of the engineering profession to unlock the potential for greater social impact around the world.
The engineering profession has contributed significantly to society. However, we believe it has a much greater potential to serve communities and systems throughout the world.
The Engineering Change Lab is a platform for collaboration to encourage individuals and organizations from across the engineering landscape to unite and collectively evolve.
The approach is designed to spark a global movement to update the purpose of the engineering profession, with a focus on contributing more towards greater social impact on a global scale.
About the Lab.
The Engineering Change Lab consists of 40 senior leaders representing multiple organizational bodies from across the engineering profession.
These senior leaders signify a powerful microcosm of Canadian engineering, with members from:
- Private enterprise.
- Universities.
- Government Associations.
- Non-profit organizations.
The core group convenes three times a year at rotating venues throughout Canada. At each meeting, representatives share their wide range of perspectives and insights in order to achieve two primary objectives:
- Deepen our understanding of the challenges facing the engineering profession in its current form. Current challenges include recurring ethics failures, lack of diversity, and low levels of industry innovation.
- Progress a portfolio of initiatives aimed at addressing the challenges we face as an industry sector, to transform the engineering industry.
Learn more about our Change Lab’s approach.
Working towards an evolved engineering profession.
The Engineering Change Lab’s current portfolio consists of multiple activities focused on a wide range of topics. In order to spark the holistic evolution of engineering , the initiatives target interconnected elements of the profession and multiple tiers of the engineering landscape.
These include facilitating professional diversity, innovation, and curriculum change in primary and secondary schools, universities, workplaces, regulators, organizational bodies and the broader public.
Current initiatives of the Engineering Change Lab include:
- The development and maintenance of a national support network for communities practicing leadership within engineering.
- Promotion and encouragement of innovative engineering culture, and diversity within the profession.
- Contribution to, and support of, the Canadian Engineering Education Challenge (CEEC).
- The ongoing expansion of the Engineers in Residence Program.
- Developing and engaging in communications strategies to shift perceptions of what engineering is, and should be.
- Establishing clear pathways from Grade School (K-12) to engineering careers.
- Reducing the barriers to admission that exist for engineering degree programs.
- Industry Innovation: the engineering water cooler.
- Ethicist-on-call.
The outcomes of the Engineering Change Lab.
- A deepened, shared understanding of the current state of the engineering profession, its higher potential, and the strategies and actions required to unlock this potential.
- Innovative solutions to existing challenges. The ‘experiments’ of the Engineering Change Lab are the tangible, collaborative actions that our sub-teams progress.
- A strengthened, more widespread network of pioneering engineers. Galvanizing relationships between key actors in the system enables us to develop and share a more comprehensive vision of the possibility for change.
- Enhanced professional skills. Our core network of leaders is developing increased capacity to work in the innovative ways required by the Lab’s initiatives. These skills are appropriate for tackling complex, adaptive problems, as opposed to the complicated problems that people are accustomed to.
How to get involved.
Individuals.
- Join the conversation at an upcoming workshop.
One of the main outcomes of the Engineering Change Lab is a continually deepened and shared understanding of the current state of the engineering profession and its higher potential. To achieve these goals, we foster dialogues around powerful questions at each Lab workshop.
Questions to consider include:
- What is the engineering profession?
- What is the higher potential of the engineering profession?
- Why do we believe it is urgent and important to unlock this potential?
- What is holding back this potential?
- What can we do to better achieve this increased potential?
- Volunteer.
- Follow our developments and progress on the Engineering Change Lab YouTube Channel.
Organizations.
- Apply to partner with the initiative and become a Lab Champion.
- Apply to become a Core Team Member.
- Align your organization’s efforts with an initiative team, a group of people dedicated to progressing a specific initiative with the Engineering Change Lab portfolio.
- Contribute to our ongoing work and become a sponsor. As a financial sponsor of the Engineering Change Lab, you secure access to a range of benefits, including:
- Opportunities to highlight your organization’s leadership in engaging with an innovative initiative and contributing to the future of the profession.
- Opportunity to leverage the well-established communication channels and membership networks of Engineers Canada, Engineers Without Borders, and other Engineering Change Lab Team partners to achieve huge reach.
- Year-round opportunities to highlight and promote your organization’s involvement.
