Introduction to Course (with Journal Entry #1)

Welcome to Engineering 804: Engineering Product Innovation. In this course, you will be introduced to a number of considerations related to research, theory, application and practice in product innovation with the goal of developing your awareness of fundamental issues. In particular, this course will focus on relevant leadership and organizational issues related to product innovation in the corporate setting.

The first half of the course includes a bit more focus on research and theory, while the second half is more focused on practice and application; but, all of the lessons in the course are designed to provide you with opportunities to practice and gain experience with the relevant concepts. By the end of this course, you should be able to apply what you have learned within a variety of organizational contexts.

While this course is designed with engineering leaders in mind, you do not need to be an engineer to take or to benefit from it. Organizations are comprised of teams of people from a variety of backgrounds, and the product innovation process is likely to ultimately engage them all. In fact, this course includes a number of discussion forums and team activities, which are in place to give students from all backgrounds an opportunity to work together and learn from each other. Diversity of skills, background and experience will be particularly beneficial in a class like this, which involves activities designed to mimic some of the product innovation work that will be required in a traditional organizational setting.

Overall Course Objectives

The overall objective for this course is to grow students’ understanding of leadership and innovation in technical contexts within the business environment. In addition, taking this course should enable you to:

• Distinguish between the major types of product innovation;
• Recognize the contextual factors that may make one type of innovation more appropriate than another in a given application;
• Describe the work an organization would undertake during a product innovation initiative, including market research, business case development, opportunity assessment and product launch;
• Identify common barriers to product innovation and strategies to overcome them;
• Describe “failure” in the context of product innovation and how to provide effective leadership in cases of failure;
• Utilize virtual product dissection to stimulate increased creativity for product development ideation;
• Demonstrate the ability to apply course concepts in the evaluation of organizational case studies and product innovation simulations; and
• Produce a product innovation proposal with a team of classmates.

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Stop, Think and Reflect: Journal Entry #1

As you start this course, please

• Offer a brief overview of what “product innovation” means to you; and
• Share a few of the things that you hope to learn in this course.

Before continuing with this lesson, please write down your answers or reactions to these prompts and submit them in the text box on the Journal Entry #1 assignment page. Note that these prompts are about your current understanding and your learning objectives, so please do not try to produce textbook definitions of product innovation; rather, use this opportunity to show your instructor where you are starting from and what you hope to gain from this course.

Reminder: You may also want to consider adding this journal entry to your ELIM e-portfolio, introduced in the Overview of Course Features.