The culmination of the program is a junior/senior experience which calls for the melding of the skills of the students from Engineering, Business, and Public Policy. The vision for “Entrepreneurial Design Realization” is to expose students to the opportunities and challenges of bringing a product design to reality (entrepreneurship) with an emphasis on environmentally and socially sustainable projects. The end product of this course will be full-scale implementations or complete design “packages” that can be taken to potential licensors or funders. The packages will include a prototype, a market assessment, an affordable manufacturing approach, and the relevant public policy implementations.
The continuity of the course will be through the faculty in the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative associated with the course. This is important in terms of creating ongoing relationships with companies and for establishing appropriate timing and expectations for future projects. An additional benefit of such continuity is that it will contribute to the success of the projects themselves. Some of the projects can be completed in a semester; others will take longer. The success of each semester and each team depends on the overall certainty of the progress and the time required to negotiate.
The future design and structure of the course will be determined by the nature of the projects and by the interests of the students. It may turn out that a cadre of students will plan on taking the course as a two-semester experience.
