Alice Agogino and Sara Beckman Win Award for Invention and Innovation in New Product Development
Alice Agogino (Mechanical Engineering) and Sara Beckman (Haas School of Business) have won a three year award from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). The grant will support entrepreneur team (E-Team) projects in their existing multidisciplinary new product development graduate course Managing New Product Development (ME290P) and the deployment of a sequence of associated courses at the undergraduate level. A freshman/sophomore class titled Designing Technology for Girls and Women students (E39D with Jennifer Mankoff in Computer Science) will apply state-of-the-art information technology and new tools in product development to tackle and design solutions to crucial societal problems in which girls or women are the user or customer. A junior/senior level course Introduction to Product Development (ME110) capitalizes on their seven years of success with the graduate course, introducing multidisciplinary team design experiences, the product development and realization process, and entrepreneurship fundamentals with mentoring by designers and inventors from local industry. This program of courses, engagement with industry and longitudinal plan for nurturing student E-Teams to post-course product realization promises to transform product development at the University of California at Berkeley with a new focus on invention, innovation and entrepreneurship.