Engineering education increasingly emphasizes pedagogical models that cultivate technical reasoning, creativity, and strategic communication within authentic problem contexts. This study reports on a scaffolded, multi-phase experiential design grounded in constructivist and cognitive apprenticeship principles, implemented within a postgraduate Engineering Management subject at an Australian university. The objective was to strengthen students’ capacity to generate innovative, data-driven solutions and communicate them effectively to technical and non-technical audiences. In Week 2, sixty-six students engaged in a 90-minute hackathon where teams of three identified an engineering problem, critically assessed multiple exponential technologies, and integrated at least three of them to design an innovative, technology-driven solution. Evaluation was conducted through peer ranking of team pitches, followed by short individual reflections on the exercise that were audio-recorded for analysis. In Week 5, students engaged in a strategy-execution “escape-room” activity that scaffolded systematic problem-solving through a series of interlinked quantitative and qualitative challenges containing deliberate distractors. This design required teams to identify relevant data, apply analytical reasoning to synthesize evidence, and make time-critical decisions. In Week 9, students completed a second sustainability-focused hackathon that integrated quantitative performance parameters and concluded with a two-minute creative pitch to a panel of two industry experts. The panel evaluation was guided by structured rubrics assessing originality, feasibility, and clarity of communication. Data was triangulated through structured observation of team dynamics during the workshops, audio-recorded post-activity reflections, and detailed evaluation feedback from the expert panel. Thematic and comparative analyses indicated measurable improvement in students’ ability to integrate technical analysis, strategic reasoning, and persuasive storytelling. The findings demonstrate that embedding hackathons within a scaffolded experiential sequence enhances evaluative judgment, adaptive decision-making, and innovation capability. The study advances a conceptual framework that explains how structured, multi-phase experiential learning activates the cognitive, communicative, and evaluative processes through which creativity and strategic competence are developed in postgraduate engineering management education. The framework clarifies how these mechanisms align graduate capability formation with the leadership requirements of technology-intensive and sustainability-oriented professional environments.