Sparking the Entrepreneurial Spirit

As engineers, many of us at some point contemplate founding a start up. For most, it is nothing more than a thought and for a sound reason – we know the start up success rate. However, if you are anything like me a dormant entrepreneurial seed lingers in the back of your brain. Product Design and Development, a foundation course in MIT’s System Design and Development program, encourages experiments in that direction.

The course reviews the product development process starting with deriving user needs and on to designing a concept and prototype. Interesting guest lecturers come to speak to class such as industrial designer Matt Kressy who talked about rapid prototyping and Yoav Shapira a startup VP who talked about agile development. Class teaching is followed by a semester long project to come up with a new product. Each group receives $800 to create a prototype. At the end of the course there is a competition and the winners receive a small budget to continue with the product development. In the past, at least one commercialized product came out of the course.

Although the course is best suited for small scale physical products my team chose to focus on a physical device that provides a software based service. Our idea may not amount to anything more than a prototype and a grade but at the very least, for a while, it sparked our entrepreneurial spirit.

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