An Inter University Collaborative Undergraduate Research Learning Experience For Product Platform Planning

Information management and information technology in product platform development has much untapped potential in product design. Product platforms enable the planned development and deployment of families of related products whereas a traditional design processes optimize on a single design. Product family design places an increased emphasis on management of information due to the reuse aspect of having a platform. This has prompted a multi-pronged collaborative research effort by four universities that covers many facets of the product platform realm. The National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program was one of these research efforts. The REU Program gave five students from the four universities the opportunity to discover platform design and participate in ongoing research between the four universities. The students spent a month each at Bucknell University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute dissecting products designed with a platform approach and applying novel design metrics. The students worked closely with professors, post-doctoral students, graduate students, and other undergraduate students on the topic while also expanding their interests in graduate school. This paper is a reflection on the research, the structure of the REU program, and the students’ overall experience. This is the second year of the program; therefore, analogies are drawn to the first year along with a follow-up on the impact to the education of the students from the first year.