Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SDM from up on the bridge

I am taking the first spring semester as a long distance student in MIT's System Design and Managment (SDM) program. The long distance option, which I am grateful for, poses some challenges. A month into the semester, I am still trying to improve the interaction with the classroom, faculty and fellow students and maintain a balance between school and work. Setting up a work station I am using my home office (/living room /dining room/ guest sofa) from which I connect to the ‘bridge’. I find it useful to work with two screens. One displays the class, the mike controls and my video (I want to see how I appear to people looking at me from the classroom). The other displays the presentation slides and notebook (OneNote). The webcam is positioned above the main screen and when I look at the other screen, I am not facing the webcam. Class participation The video and sound quality are good. Material is always available before hand on the web. So keeping up with the studies is eas...
3 comments
Read more

Frugal Innovation in Healthcare

I have been working on EVOCAM a low cost endoscopy system with my partners at Evolving Technologies. Using frugal innovation techniques we developed a light, portable endoscopy prototype for a fraction of the price of existing solutions. Recently Medicine for Humanity physicians used our system to operate in Uganda. To allow training to continue from afar, after volunteer physicians returned home, we are planning to add a tele-medical feature to our device. I joined the team after they already had a working prototype and focused on market research, creating a concise massage and preparing a parametric engineering evaluation that exemplifies how EVOTECH is positioned in the market place. Basically everything it takes to turn a good idea into a good business plan. I am currently working rendering another EVOCAM out of MIT’s hobby machine shop. Together we took EVOTECH into MIT’s $100K business plan semi-finals (still competing) and to a bunch of other competitions in MIT and out...
6 comments
Read more

10 Recommended Readings on Business and Policy

Piles of business and policy books are published every year. While almost any book has something worthwhile in it, only a small fraction are good. And for every profound idea there is a load of simplifications, unbiased assertions, after the fact reasoning and hype. When considering what to read I know what to avoid. For starters, I’d avoid anything with a title similar to this blog title – anything with a number in it: “365 days of success”, “8 new roles of money” (from the Kiyosaki who brought us rich dad poor dad) or “101 ways to turn your business around”. I also avoid biographies and autobiographies. They tend to present a simplified view where the fortunes of companies and nations are over attributed to one person. This view is misleading and even dangerous when people start believing in saviors and messiahs . Autobiographies have all the flaws of biographies and they are also biased and are too often just pure narcissism. Finally, I won’t read a book about a company written f...
3 comments
Read more