New Product Development with a Focus on Design for Sustainability

The course is a Management of Technology course offered jointly by the College of Engineering and the Haas School. We aim to have half MBA students and half Engineering students in the class, and facilitate students to form mixed teams for the development of their products. Students from the California College of the Arts will also participate on the teams. The course is introductory in nature, aimed at those who have not experienced a full product development cycle on a cross-disciplinary team in the past, or those who are seeking specialization in design for sustainability issues. The focus of the course is management of innovation processes, from product definition through ramp-up of product manufacturing. Using a project in which students will be asked to design and develop a product or service focused on sustainability, we will teach processes for collecting customer and user needs data, prioritizing that data, developing a product specification, sketching and building product prototypes, and interacting with the customer during product development. The course is intended as a very hands-on experience in the product development process.