COURSE NUMBER: MBA290N.1, Cross-listed with ME and SIMS

COURSE TITLE: New Product Development (project)

UNITS OF CREDIT: 3

INSTRUCTORS: Sara Beckman and Alice Agogino

E-MAIL ADDRESSES: beckman@haas.berkeley.edu and agogino@berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATIONS: http://catalyst.haas.berkeley.edu and https://bspace.berkeley.edu/

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Monday and Wednesday, 9:30-11:00 AM

PREREQUISITE(S): None

CLASS FORMAT:
This class entails the execution of a major project -- developing a product or service from idea through first pass prototype in a cross-disciplinary team of business, engineering and San Jose State University industrial design students.  Teams will be coached by faculty and by designers from local firms. In-class time will entail a mixture of lectures, case discussions, guest speakers and group project work. 

STUDENTS WHO TAKE THIS CLASS SHOULD BE COMMITTED TO PARTICIPATING FULLY IN A TEAM PROJECT.  TEAMS TYPICALLY MEET FOR 1-3 HOURS PER WEEK OUTSIDE CLASS THROUGHOUT THE SEMESTER.  (THIS IS IN ADDITION TO INDIVIDUAL TIME SPENT PREPARING FOR CLASS DISCUSSION.)  STUDENTS MUST HAVE FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES TO ACCOMMODATE MEETINGS WITH STUDENTS OUTSIDE HAAS.

REQUIRED READINGS:

Our textbook will be Product Design and Development (3rd Edition) by Karl Ulrich and Steve Eppinger -- a very practically oriented text that takes the reader through the product development process step-by-step. We will supplement the book with a course reader consisting primarily of cases. (There is some possibility we will use a new book next year, but we are still working that out.)

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:

Class participation, a set of small assignments and the design project will form the basis for the class grade.  NOTE: We will meet during the FINAL EXAM period for the class during which time students will present their final project outputs to a panel of industry judges.

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:

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 San Jose State University industrial design program 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.

The focus of the course is management of new product development 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 of their choosing, 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.   (Note for those of you thinking about products or services you would like to develop  you must be willing to share what you are doing on your project with the class, and you must be able to complete a first pass prototype within the 15-week semester).  This is an ideal course for those who participated in the UNIDO summer program if you want to continue the development of products you worked on there.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES:

Sara L. Beckman has taught at the Haas School for over fifteen years in the areas of operations management, manufacturing strategy and product design and development. During that time she has won the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award three times and the campus Distinguished Teaching Award once. She has also worked at Hewlett-Packard where she was Director of the Product Generation Change Management Team, which modeled manufacturing strategy decisions and implemented team management structures in new product development, and in the Operations Management practice at Booz, Allen and Hamilton. She presently serves on the boards of the Corporate Design Foundation and the Building Materials Holding Corporation.

Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and affliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. She directs the Berkeley Expert Systems Technology (BEST) Laboratory, the Berkeley Instructional Technology Studio (BITS) and is working with Dean Newton to develop a Service Learning Media Lab and Design/Prototyping Studio in the new CITRIS building. She is currently Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate, having served as Vice Chair during the 2004-05 academic year. She has served in a number of other administrative positions at UC Berkeley including Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. She also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and the (www.smete.org) digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. She has supervised 65 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.

Leslie Speer, an instructor at San Jose State University, is a designer and educator with 20+ years of experience in the design world. She received her BSID from California State University at Long Beach, did graduate studies at ENSCI in Paris, and received a Master's in Design from Middlesex University in London. Currently she is a director at Bolton Associates, a London based design firm. She has worked for companies and clients in the USA, Europe and Mexico including E.I. Dupont de Nemours, Phillips NV, Praxis Product Design, Sun Microsystems, frogdesign, Case de Cultura (Tenancingo), Banomex, among others. She has worked for over a decade with artisans in small villages in Mexico, helping them to create viable products for the world market. Her current work focuses on social entrepreneurship and on developing strategies for applying more inclusive participatory design methods to emerging markets in the developing regions of the world. She was the Assistant Chair of the ID program at California College of the Arts for 7 years and has taught a multidisciplinary course with UC Berkeley and CCA for the last 8 years. She is currently the Chair of the IDSA Design for the Majority Professional Interest Section.