Global education for packaging engineers: beyond science and technology

The National Science Foundation has agreed to fund a 3-year (1995-98) pilot program called Global Innovation for Engineers (GIE), and has chosen to steer the funding through Georgia Tech's Packaging Research Center (PRC), in order to enhance the PRC's educational programs and to provide to GIE a built-in set of member companies. We have marketed the GIE program to the top global leaders in electronics, computers, and communications, both US based and also some non-US companies with a strong US presence who know they need to hire more global American engineers. This paper outlines the program's early results and identifies the strategies that seem to be working as well as some that are not.