Do engineering creativity/innovation courses impact engineering innovativeness?

Through five years of previous NSF-sponsored research working with engineering education programs and major U.S. Corporations, we have identified the most important characteristics of engineering innovators (across and in each phase of the innovation process) and validated a new instrument (ABAKAS = Assessment of Behaviors, Attitudes, Knowledge, Attributes, and Skills) to assess them. In our context, an innovation is a product, process, or concept that has been discovered, developed, and implemented in a sustainable manner in a community. The innovation process is therefore defined to have a beginning (discovery), a middle (development) and a completion phase (implementation). Claims on how to create innovations or be more innovative are as popular as diet plans, but these claims are not connected by evidence to engineering student learning experiences and outcomes. Courses with titles like `Innovation and Creativity for Engineers' have not provided assessment evidence that these courses positively impact or enable the characteristics that we now know comprise engineering innovativeness. Our key research question is: What is the impact of Creativity/Innovation courses and their ilk (individually or as a sequence) on the engineering innovativeness characteristics of engineering students?