Lessons Learned In Building Cross Disciplinary Partnerships In Entrepreneurship Education Through Integrated Product Development (Ipd)

Since 1994 a team of Lehigh faculty have been developing and implementing a multi-disciplinary educational environment to enable undergraduates and graduate students to experience the challenges and creative exhilaration of technical entrepreneurship through new product development. Lehigh’s Integrated Product Development (IPD) program provides a campus focus for cross-disciplinary collaboration. With top-level administrative support, additional degree programs are under development. These include Integrated Business and Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Design Arts, Masters of Business Administration and Engineering and an entrepreneurial ventures track in the MBA program. Through planning, trial and error and (now) a formal comprehensive assessment process, the IPD faculty team has developed basic lessons learned from this curricula development experience. These lessons and the skills needed to succeed closely mimics those learned in any new venture process, with the caveat that colleges and universities are unique organizations with unique incentive, organizational and individual behavior issues. The categories of lessons learned include: vision and mission, customer focus, teaming, interpersonal relationships, leadership, resource development and allocations, recognition and rewards, infrastructure development, managing curricula development and managing a constantly changing administration. Introduction The need for cross-disciplinary teams for new product development has been well studied and documented [Ref 1-7]. Over the past ten years the need for students to experience new product development and in particular, to experience cross-disciplinary teaming has made its way into accreditation criterion for engineering, business and even arts and science. College recruiters are constantly asking our students “Have you worked in teams?” “Has it been a successful experience?” “What team building and leadership skills have you developed?” Lehigh students enrolled in our Integrated Product Development (IPD) courses are fortunate to have this experience while undergraduates. Recruiters have stated that each year the students in Lehigh’s IPD program are “the best prepared in this class of recruits.” In addition our student report to us that the job interview itself often focused on the results on their year-long IPD project. This is not by happenstance, but by design and planning. The IPD projects has been designed to give students industrial experience in new product development as well as the opportunity to work in a truly cross-disciplinary team. Ideally these teams are made up of students from engineering, business and design arts. This cross-disciplinary approach has evolved over the past seven years and for the upcoming year 2003 projects, there will be 203 students from 24 majors in 33 teams working with 19 companies on a variety of P ge 821.1 Lehigh University Session #3454 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2003, American Society for Engineering Education projects. With this wealth of project experience, we have developed a classification scheme for companies and projects. Project can be classified as 1) R&D projects, 2) new to the market projects, 3) products that are new to the company, 4) product line extensions or product improvement projects, 5) manufacturing process improvement, 6) Manufacturing equipment improvement. Over the past 7 years and throughout many of the year-long projects, we have experienced companies in many different situations including on the down side company buy-outs, company bankruptcies, severe downturns in business, death and divorce of company owners, law suits in which we were named as defendants. On the ups side we have witnessed company start-ups, initial placement offers, mergers and companies involved in exponential growth. Understanding the current position of the company, local, regional and the overall economy are important to project success. The projects themselves can also be classified and organized in terms of resources – money, people and expertise needed. Finally, understanding our own institution, college and department and its current position in organizational, local and regional economics is necessary and particularly important as the program matures and you are start to seek permanent funding. Overview of Lehigh’s IPD Program As we have developed our own program, we have realized that there are many similarities between new product development process and our own process for developing the IPD program. The process involves the following: 1) development of an implementation team, 2) planning, 3) developing alternative program designs, 4) selecting the best design that fit our needs, 5) developing pilots to prove the concept and legitimize costs, 6) developing a plan to ramp up, 7) secure resources to implement the ramp up, 8) starting the full-blown program, measuring results and continuously improving it. For this overall process and for each of these steps there are lessons learned as well as strategies developed, tried, refined, retried and retried again until they worked within our unique and often changing educational environment. Developing a cross-disciplinary faculty team At various stages of development Lehigh’s IPD have been fortunate to attract high quality faculty from various departments from across campus. These faculty members are kindred spirits who were not happy with the status quo, who wanted to improve their own department or major, who were willing to take risks and who were looking for outlets for their creativity. Again, we were lucky that most department chairs encouraged and rewarded faculty for participating in IPD. The core faculty group found common ground in their collective interest in engineering design, entrepreneurship and teamwork. However, even this was not without false starts. In fact, we spent two years in committee with a group “interested” faculty who argued over the definition of the word ‘design.’ What we discovered is that we need a group of faculty who are not only “interested” but action oriented as well. The make up of the IPD Implementation committee was at first dominated by mechanical engineering faculty. This has since evened out with the addition of business faculty and more recently, design faculty. The makeup of the faculty team has been fluid with people coming on P ge 821.2 Lehigh University Session #3454 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2003, American Society for Engineering Education and off as needed. The individuals on the team have to develop mutual trust, a common vision, goals and share in rewards. Finding the right people to work in a team for a long period of time is probably the most difficult task of the implementation steps. This is particularly true when you consider that Universities are the last bastion for “Lone Ranger” type of individual: fiercely independent, often isolated, distrustful but usually highly principled. In order to find the right faculty you can try anything. Talk to department chairs about your need to collaborate, followed by one-on-one conversations with potential partners. For example at one point in the IPD start up, pairs of faculty went to each and every university department in the College of Arts and Science to make a pitch for faculty to join in the program development. Another method we tried was to read each faculty profile in the university catalog looking for business faculty with engineering background, or engineering faculty who started their own businesses. If you are told to avoid certain faculty, go talk to them yourself, anyway. In our experience, we had a department chair actually try to hide a young faculty member from us. This faculty member turned out to be a true leader of the IPD effort in the College of Arts and Science. In order to keep faculty from across campus involved in your cross-disciplinary program, you must develop mutually beneficial relationships based on openness and complete trust. For us this means openness in budgets and finances and the potential for recognition and rewards for everyone who contributes. The rewards do not have to be financial. It can be letters of support at the annual review, nominations for awards, opportunities to lead, opportunities for consulting, sharing with all participants the opportunity for grants, gifts and research funding. In developing an academic program, it is very important to protect younger faculty. At researchoriented institutions we would recommend only including tenured faculty to be part of an implementation team for an academic program. Interested untenured assistant professors should be advised to focus on establishing research in this area and develop relationships with funding sources. Tenured faculty should be protected from overloads. Many energetic faculty are coerced into teaching interesting course “on the margins.” While this is fine for one-time pilots, it is not sustainable. The faculty team must get continuing commitment from academic department chairs and deans to support faculty involvement in cross-disciplinary programs as part of their normal annual teaching load. Planning The first action item of the faculty committee is a plan with timeline. The plan includes developing 1) a vision, 2) goals to be accomplished, 3) program components, 4) evaluation strategies and metrics. Figure 1 shows the result of our planning in a graphical form. This figure is a visual consensus-generating tool where the timeline goes from top to bottom. We have used this method often and with great success for this and other projects. The timeline in a university setting is another interesting issue. University faculty measure time in semesters or quarters, not man hours as is done in industry. Regardless of the scope on the scope of