Tucked away in the heart of Rabat, Morocco is L'École Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs. An Engineering school, it is one of the most prestigious in the country. As a student in Penn State University's Engineering Leadership Development program, I was in Morocco as part of a group of students involved in a partnership that allowed students from both schools to work together, learn together, and share aspects of our cultures over the course of one awesome, action-packed week.

One of our goals for the week was to come up with a new solid fuel stove design. People die every day in developing countries from smoke inhalation due to solid fuel stoves, and by coming up with a realistic, new design, we could save lives.

As college students, we all knew the Engineering Design Process:

1. Problem Definition
2. Solution Development
3. Solution Testing
4. Design

Effective design really is about so much more than just these four steps, though. It was sitting in an Ecole Mohammadia dorm room at 11:00PM that real innovation happened. Two of my teammates and I sat down and really tried to put together all our research into one effective design. Over the course of the past few days, we had gone out into the field and gathered all kinds of data about what was currently being used, and also looked up effective designs in the developed world. We could take parts of this research into account, but needed to be flexible enough so that our design could actually be implemented in developing regions.

My friends Mountassir (a Civil Engineer), Nabil (a Materials Engineer), and I (an Information Scientist) all sat down on the edge of a bed, a broken chair, and the floor respectively, and got to work. For this team, the diversity was not in the fact that it was two Moroccans and one American, it was in our skillsets, experiences, and worldview. We all had different skills to bring to the table as far as creating and communicating our design, we all had different experiences with stoves in the past, and all thought in different ways. Going back and forth sharing potential ideas, it was then that we were able to come up with a truly creative design (just one step on the way to innovation).

I'm a process person, and I love and respect processes, but I can't really say it was following a process that led to us coming up with this design, it was just our ability to sit down and work together and share ideas. Our design:

While this may not be the most intuitive diagram, it was created after numerous deliberations about all kinds of factors such as conductive materials, air entry, air heating, combustion, types of fuel usage, baking capabilities, the size of what's cooking, smoke exit, fuel removal, cleaning, and all types of other considerations. 

An effective, diverse team needs to be comfortable working with each other, and great things can be the result!