Major Course Projects

In this course you will be asked to submit both an individual and a group Product Innovation Proposal. Overviews of these major course projects are listed below so that you can be prepared to incorporate all that you learn into these projects as you move through the course.

Individual Product Innovation Proposal

Your individual proposal may focus on any type of product (or process) innovation that you would like. This individual proposal will be due near the mid-point of the semester, and the assignments from each week leading up to the due date are designed to help you build toward your proposal. Your proposal submission will include both a 3– to 6–page written portion and a 2– to 5–minute video summary portion, addressing some specific highlights of your written proposal.

The video will be produced and shared with your classmates using an integrated technology tool called Bongo. Students will evaluate each other's video summary proposals according to a rubric, which will be provided to you. The evaluation rubric will emphasize information drawn directly from the lesson content and will be embedded within an ungraded survey for the purpose of anonymously rating the proposals of your peers.

Virtual Teams: Team Product Innovation Proposal

A virtual team was probably unheard of a decade ago, but they are now a critical mechanism for integrating information, making decisions, and implementing actions around the globe. A virtual team is a group of people who work across space, time and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies. People in a virtual group are geographically dispersed; they interact mostly through technology and may never meet face-to-face. There are advantages and disadvantages to working with virtual teams. However, being aware of both before you start working together, can make for a smoother time together as a team.

The development of new technologies, such as web-based tools, frees people from being confined to work in one physical space and gives people flexibility. Here are the advantages to virtual teams:

• Technology-mediated communication enables people to work remotely from anywhere that is convenient. We do not have to travel to one particular location in order to work with others. Time that used to be wasted on commuting now can be saved for working on more valuable things.
• Virtual teams enable people from thousands of miles away to collaborate. Synchronous communication makes it possible to connect with people from far away.
• Another advantage that is enabled by long distance collaboration is the sharing of resources. For example, a virtual team of Chinese and Americans designing an engineering product reported that they were able to find a part for their design in China which was 40 times cheaper than the same part in the U.S.; the final prototyping, however, was much cheaper in the United States. So the group saved money by identifying which resources were least expensive in each country.

Despite the advantages, virtual teams may also face a number of disadvantages, including:

• Decreased clarity of role and goal;
• Decline in work efficiency and effectiveness;
• Decreased work satisfaction; and
• Declined project success.

However, those disadvantages are not inherent characteristics of virtual groups, but rather results of group members not handling well the communication challenges they face in working in virtual teams. Again, being aware of this issues helps teams work more effectively together and can help the synthesis of virtual teams as you work on your project over the course of the semester.

Students will be assigned to virtual teams by the instructor to work on further developing the most highly-rated Individual Product Innovation Proposals. Note: once assigned one the Product Innovation to further develop, teams are free to make changes to the individual proposal details as part of creating this team proposal.

For this assignment, teams will be developing both an 8– to 10–page written portion and a 3– to 6–minute video summary of the proposal's highlights within Bongo. Please use appropriate headings and subheadings so that it is clear that you have addressed all of the assignment's requirements.

More detailed instructions for both of these projects can be found on the next two pages.