Race Cars, Robots and the Problem with Looking Innovative

If every engineering program looks innovative, how does any of them become distinct?

When I began this research in 2023, I wanted to understand how Canadian universities were positioning their engineering programs in an increasingly competitive higher education landscape. Six research-intensive universities were selected for comparison: the University of Victoria, Queen’s University, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary and Dalhousie University.

The question was not simply what each university was saying about engineering. I wanted to understand the relationship between what an institution promoted, how it was portrayed by others, and what stakeholders actually perceived. The distinction matters. A university can decide what it wants its brand to stand for, but it has considerably less control over what students, alumni, faculty, industry partners, media and other audiences actually say about it. In a digital environment, those external voices are not peripheral to the brand. They are the brand.

The study therefore combined a perceptual survey with social sensing and thematic content analysis of digital and institutional artifacts, including social media, Reddit, institutional websites, viewbooks and Maclean's profiles. Across 59 coded artifacts, the analysis generated almost 4,000 thematic references. What I found was both unsurprising and surprisingly revealing.

When innovation starts to look the same

Engineering has an unusually rich visual and verbal vocabulary. It is easy to understand why. A race car demonstrates that students build things. A robot communicates technology and innovation. A rocket suggests ambition. A lab suggests serious research. A student team suggests community and experiential learning.

The problem isn't any individual symbol. The problem is repetition.

Across the six universities, race cars, robots and related technology were repeatedly used to communicate innovation, hands-on learning and student experience. At the same time, every institution was competing in the space of women in engineering.

Again, these are important stories. Engineering absolutely should be talking about women in the discipline. Student teams really do build race cars and robots. Experiential learning really does matter.

But when competitors repeatedly use the same evidence to make the same claims, those claims become less useful as sources of distinction.

This is one of the central challenges of brand strategy in higher education. Institutions tend to look at the things that matter most to their audiences and then communicate those things more forcefully. But if everyone is doing the same thing, greater volume does not create greater distinctiveness. It simply makes the category louder.

The problem with a crowded category

The research showed considerable similarity among the six engineering brands. Student experience was the strongest driver of choice across the group, while themes such as innovation, research, experiential learning, sustainability and diversity appeared repeatedly across institutions.

None of those territories is inherently wrong. In fact, they are probably necessary parts of an engineering brand. But a brand cannot become distinctive simply by assembling a longer list of things that are all true. The more interesting question is: which truths are particularly ownable? That is where the study began to reveal some unexpected opportunities.

Graduate success was relatively underused. So were top-employer recognition, work-integrated learning—particularly co-op and fieldwork—and undergraduate research. Internationalization also appeared to have room to grow as a point of distinction. On the brand-personality side, ruggedness and activism were comparatively underrepresented.

These findings don't mean that every engineering school should suddenly reposition itself around being rugged, activist or career-focused. The point is that distinctiveness often lives in the spaces a category has overlooked. That is a very different exercise from trying to make a familiar message more memorable.

##The faculty story we weren't hearing

Perhaps the most interesting finding concerned faculty. Across the six institutions, faculty were overwhelmingly represented as researchers. Research, awards, funding, partnerships and academic recognition were prominent parts of the story. What appeared much less frequently was faculty as teachers, educators and mentors. This is a curious gap.

Research excellence is an important part of the value proposition of a research-intensive university, but students experience a university through people as much as through institutional achievements. They encounter professors in classrooms, laboratories, design studios and project teams. They rely on them for guidance, mentorship and feedback. They remember the people who made a difficult concept click or encouraged them to pursue something they hadn't considered. Yet the institutional brand can make those same people almost invisible as educators.

That creates an interesting strategic possibility. Rather than simply finding another way to say that faculty are world-class researchers, an institution might ask whether the teaching, mentorship and relationships students experience are themselves part of what makes its engineering education distinct.

Sometimes the most valuable brand territory is hiding inside something an organization has stopped noticing. A brand doesn't stop at the edge of the marketing department. This was ultimately the reason for looking at the promoted, portrayed and perceived brands together.

Universities are accustomed to thinking about brand as something they manage through official communications: the website, campaign, viewbook, social channels, advertising and visual identity. Those things matter, but they are only one part of the picture.

Students create content. Alumni tell stories. Faculty publish and post. Industry partners talk about their relationships with institutions. Journalists frame achievements. People comment, recommend, criticize and compare. Increasingly, prospective students encounter all of this before they ever arrive at an official university website. The brand therefore exists in a much larger ecosystem of signals.

In this study, social sensing helped make some of those signals visible. By examining digital artifacts alongside institutional communications and perceptual data, it became possible to see where the official story and the organic story reinforced one another—and where they didn't. That distinction is important because a brand strategy based entirely on institutional communications can produce a beautifully articulated position that doesn't necessarily reflect what people actually experience or talk about.

The most useful brand work has to hold both things at once: what you want to be known for and what the world is already telling you about yourself. Three years later, the question still matters

The research was completed in 2023, so it would be irresponsible to suggest that it provides a current measurement of every engineering brand in Canada. But some more recent evidence suggests the underlying strategic challenge remains relevant.

A 2025 study examining how engineering students choose universities identified factors including program standing, career development and institutional standing among important considerations, and specifically argued for engineering programs to establish a distinct brand image rather than relying primarily on broad institutional reputation.

And the familiar symbols haven't disappeared. Race cars, rockets, robots and competitive engineering teams remain prominent ways for universities to demonstrate hands-on learning and technical capability.

Which brings us back to the original question. If everyone can show innovation, what makes yours distinct?

##The race car isn't the problem.

I don't think the answer is to stop showing race cars. If students have designed and built an extraordinary vehicle, it is a great story. The same is true of robots, rockets, drones and any number of other engineering projects.

The issue is what happens when the artifact becomes the message. A race car can demonstrate a distinctive educational experience. But a race car photograph, on its own, doesn't tell a prospective student why this engineering program is meaningfully different from another engineering program with a race car.

The distinction has to live somewhere deeper: in the experience, the culture, the people, the outcomes, the relationships, the place or the particular combination of strengths that another institution cannot credibly replicate.

This is where brand strategy becomes more interesting than messaging. The goal isn't to manufacture something different for the sake of being different. It is to identify something true, relevant and ownable, and then build enough consistency around it that people begin to recognize it without being told what to think.

##The lesson extends well beyond engineering

Engineering simply provides a particularly clear example of a broader higher education problem. Universities operate in crowded categories. Most can credibly claim innovation, impact, student-centredness, research excellence, sustainability, inclusion, community and opportunity. Most have talented people, successful graduates and impressive facilities.

The challenge is not finding more good things to say. It is deciding which good things matter most, which are genuinely distinctive, and which can be supported by what people actually experience and say.

That requires looking beyond the brand guidelines and the institutional narrative. It requires listening to the signals accumulating around the institution and understanding where those signals converge, where they conflict and where there may be unexpected territory worth exploring.

Because your brand is not simply what you say about yourself. It is the relationship between what you say, what people experience and what they say when you're not in the room. And somewhere in that space is the opportunity to become distinct.