Your most creative engineers should have three important qualities

When you examine your most creative engineering talent, you will find they have the following attributes and skill sets:

1. Your Creative Engineers Are Autodidacts - Don't look for them to be spoon-fed information or knowledge.  Don't look for them to be involved in standard educational settings.  Their thinking is different, so many standard ways of teaching your most creative engineers will not be helpful.  As an organization, let them "Think Different" and let them "Learn Different."  They prefer to learn on their won in their on many - - so please let them.
2. Your Creative Engineers Are Polymaths - They don't see a world of silos and vertical thinking.  Your most creative engineers will see connections along multidisciplinary horizontal lines of knowledge.  All creative people are like this.  If they jump into anthropology, history, sociology, neuroscience, digital technology, architecture or interior design - please let them.  David Brooks said it best yesterday in his column - "Creative people often want to be strangers in a strange land.  They want to live in dissimilar environments to maximize the creative tensions between different parts of themselves."  We live is a world of multidisciplinary problems that will need horizontal thinking engineers.  Those engineers that can see something in Field A that will solve a problem in Field B will be highly successful.
3. Your Creative Engineers Will Be Very Persistent - They don't let skepticism or rejection stop them.  The creative genius of a Gates or Jobs or a Zuckerberg had a very simple foundation - perseverance.  They don't give up.  Never!  They don't see the world as unfair or are they prone to blaming failure on others - they are much more motivated by self-motivation and self-confidence.