Enhancing Faculty Competence in Lean Thinking Bodies of Knowledge

The Lean Aerospace Initiative’s (LAI) Educational Network (EdNet) established in 2002 is comprised of 32 universities who share a common interest to collaborate on developing and deploying curriculum for teaching lean six sigma fundamentals. Supported by a small staff centered at MIT, collaborating faculty have developed a week-long LAI Lean Academy® course, and delivered it to multiple audiences on-campus and in industry and government. The topics of the course map to many CDIO syllabus topics, and the pedagogy and assessment methods have borrowed on the CDIO knowledge base.

This paper reports on this undertaking and on the extent to which it has contributed to developing faculty competency for teaching Lean Thinking in engineering and management. Results from this study reveal that instructors have significantly improved their competency to teach Lean Thinking during their affiliation with the LAI EdNet. On average, the instructors’ proficiency in twelve Lean Enterprise knowledge areas has increased a full level, from 3.2 to 4.2, on the CDIO Syllabus MIT Activity Based Proficiency Scale. The instructors report that collaboration on conceiving, developing and implementing the curriculum has been the most valuable EdNet activity for increasing their competency.