Resilient Engineering to Advance Public Value and Innovation in Research Periphery Countries

This IMPRESS-U project is jointly funded by NSF, Estonian Research Council (ETAG), Latvian Council of Science (LCS), Research Council of Lithuania (LMT), National Science Center of Poland (NCN), and US National Academy of Sciences. The research will be performed in a multilateral international partnership that unites the Arizona State University (USA), University of Tartu (Estonia), Riga Stradiņš University (Latvia), Vilnius University (Lithuania), University of Warsaw (Poland), and Lviv Polytechnic National University (Ukraine).

This project examines how uncertainty and crisis drive innovation and change in engineering education, particularly academic departments operating in challenging environments. We ask: What policy, institutional, structural, and cultural factors determine or hinder the successful implementation of innovations in engineering programs during times of crisis? Engineering as a discipline is transforming to be more responsive to regional societal and economic needs. Throughout history, crisis has driven technological innovation, from commercializable products to resilient infrastructure systems. Yet, how programs that train engineers for future careers adapt and/or transform in the face of crisis remains underexplored. Our study investigates the academic engineering ecosystems that shape such innovation including an examination of organizational capacities, faculty and administrative engagement, local economic interests, and policy support structures. We focus on “Research Periphery Countries” (RPC), which face different challenges from more economically advanced countries. These include market and economic volatility, security threats, and other disruptions that hinder an engineering school's ability to succeed. By identifying both successful models and failed attempts, we aim to provide actionable findings to guide organizational and programmatic design strategies in engineering schools. Our findings will support policy, economic, and other local factors in advancing societal resilience, particularly in crisis-affected regions. Ultimately, we seek to inform globally relevant approaches to collaborative research, interdisciplinary education, and public value-oriented innovation in engineering schools.

This project uses a multi-country mixed-methods case study design involving academic engineering programs operating in different RPC contexts. The comparative case study methodology enables us to account for cross-national variation in policy, budgetary, and other factors relevant to engineering education. Data collection will focus on five RPCs and include semi-structured interviews and secondary documents like institutional policy and strategy documents. Using qualitative design principles, we will organize cases first by country, then by transformational initiative type (organizational/pedagogical), enabling cross-national comparisons. Transcribed interviews and policy documents will be coded and analyzed, using text analysis software with multiple coders to ensure inter-rater reliability. Thematic analysis will identify key ecosystem characteristics influencing engineering transformations, which will inform the development of a typology of crisis-responsive reforms and related barriers and opportunities. The intellectual merit of our project includes an interdisciplinary research design grounded in crisis science and theories of public value and institutional transformation. Studies of innovation in RPCs have focused on policy-level strategies, but little exploration of RPC-specific higher education and/or engineering-related innovation has been conducted. The project’s broader impacts will be evident in the potentially transformative lesson learned. Findings will identify approaches, institutional support resources, and other ecosystem supports aimed at building more resilient, socially responsive academic engineering systems in challenging contexts.