Green Product Development: Design for Sustainability

3 credits · Graduate

The focus of the course is management of innovation processes for sustainable products, from product definition to sustainable manufacturing and financial models. Using a project in which students will be asked to design and develop a product or service focused on sustainability, we will teach processes for collecting customer and user needs data, prioritizing that data, developing a product specification, sketching and building product prototypes, and interacting with the customer/community during product development. The course is intended as a very hands-on experience in the "green" product development process. The course will be a Management of Technology course offered jointly with the College of Engineering and the Haas School of Business. In addition, it will also receive credit towards the new Certificate on Engineering Sustainability and Environmental Management program. We aim to have half MBA students and half Engineering students (with a few other students, such as from the School of Information) in the class. The instructors will facilitate students to form mixed disciplinary reams for the development of their "green" products.