Background: Design and creativity are essential elements of problem-solving.

Purpose: The purpose of the research presented herein is to identify the impacts of learning in different study programs on students’ abilities to generate and implement creative design solutions.

Design/Method: An experiment was designed and conducted within the context of a semester-long graduate engineering course titled “Human-Centered Design and Manufacturing” at a large American public university. The experiment featured classroom data collection from an experimental cohort at four different stages of an intervention using a questionnaire. Results were then compared to those of a control group’s.

Results: Preliminary results showed that students’ systematic creativity learning lessened the differences in creative outcomes due to industrial experience and formal degree program differences.

Conclusions: Results from this study could help better prepare students for the ever-increasing interdisciplinary nature of engineering teams in different industrial settings all over the world. The intervention designed for this study will also help students more effectively transition from conceptualizing design concepts, to manufacturing those designs, and finally presenting results to key shareholders.