Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Course Objectives

The focus of Product Design and Development is integration of the marketing, design, and manufacturing functions of the firm in creating a new product. The course is intended to provide you with the following benefits:

• Competence with a set of tools and methods for product design and development.
• Confidence in your own abilities to create a new product.
• Awareness of the role of multiple functions in creating a new product (e.g. marketing, finance, industrial design, engineering, production).
• Ability to coordinate multiple, interdisciplinary tasks in order to achieve a common objective.
• Reinforcement of specific knowledge from other courses through practice and reflection in an action-oriented setting.
• Enhanced team working skills.

Expectations

This is a 12-unit graduate course. Accordingly, the course has been designed to demand approximately 12 hours per week of your time. It is expected that each student will prepare for and attend all of the class sessions and will regularly enhance class discussions. Most important though are substantial and continuous contributions to the progress of the team project. Experience with project-based design courses is that students often develop high expectations for their projects and devote substantially more time than is required by the instructors. Faculty applaud this enthusiasm, but this course will not penalize students who establish a twelve hour per week average time constraint for their efforts.

Grading

Course Materials

Ulrich, Karl, and Steven Eppinger. Product Design and Development. 3rd ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2003. ISBN: 9780072471465.

Thomke, Stefan, and Ashok Nimgade. "IDEO Product Development." Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Case 9-600-143, June 22, 2000.

Bowen, H. Kent, and Thomas Everett. "SweetWater." Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Case 9-695-026, November 1, 1994.