New Product Development

Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Haas School of Business University of California, Berkeley

Course Title: Units:

Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methods 3 SYLLABUS

Purpose, Objectives and Teaching Methods

This course is part of the Management of Technology program at the University of California, Berkeley. It is considered an operationally focused course, as it aims to develop the interdisciplinary skills required for successful product development in today’s competitive marketplace. Engineering, SIMS and Business students from Berkeley and students from the California College of the Arts join forces on small product development teams to step through the new product development process in detail, learning about the available tools and techniques to execute each process step along the way. Each student brings his or her own disciplinary perspective to the team effort, and must learn to synthesize that perspective with those of the other students in the group to develop a sound, marketable product. Students can expect to depart the semester understanding new product development processes as well as useful tools, techniques and organizational structures that support new product development practice. Although the course focuses on the application of these principles to new product development, they are more broadly applicable to innovation in general – of products, services, organizations, business strategies and governmental policies. This is a three-unit graduate course. Accordingly, we have designed the course to demand approximately 12 hours per week of your time. We expect that each student will prepare for and attend all of the class sessions and will participate fully on a project team. This is particularly critical, as a number of the class sessions are “labs” during which we expect you to work with your team on your development project. We have tried to smooth the workload for the course so that it...