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MGT 541New Product Design  Class Philosophy

This is a hands-on course about product, process, and service design.  By doing competitive team-based projects we experience the most important lessons of design:  To use the objective, quantitative, and analytic tools of business and engineering to support the critical subjective decisions that must be negotiated in a diverse and creative group.  And to do so without diluting the value of the tools, without poisoning the group process, and most importantly, without developing yet another lame product. 

Students in the course are assigned into four-person interdisciplinary design teams.  Membership is drawn from undergraduate and graduate biomedical, electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering, and from the MBA concentrations of marketing, operations, entrepreneurship, strategy, and general management. Each team has at least one undergraduate engineer and one graduate marketing student as its core.

The primary challenge of this course is to conceptualize a new product and to produce a prototype version of it.  Projects are chosen in a way that maximizes the potential for different solutions, while ensuring a basic level of success. The goal of the course is to gain exposure to the principles and methods of product development, and to apply them in a realistic context. The primary deliverable for each team is an actual prototype product, the design of which must be justified through a formal need analysis, concept generation and selection process, and manufacturing cost analysis.  The ultimate design and prototype is presented during a product fair in the last week of the 7-week course.  The designs are critiqued by potential users, professional designers, and by the local business community.

“We don’t have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. … But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.”

Steve Jobs