The Evolution of a Course on Creativity and New Product Development

Creativity and New Product Development is a two semester senior design course for Mechanical Engineering students at the University of Virginia. Design thinking is fundamental to all stages of this course. It emphasizes creative thinking and stimulates the students to generate diverse solutions to problems. Students are required to work in teams developing new product ideas. Each team carries their idea through to a working prototype, and manufacturing and business plans. They also submit a proposal for funding and a draft patent application. In its current form, the class project is usually the basis for the senior thesis. For this paper, we reviewed the teams and projects from the last ten years and identified those we felt were clear successes and clear failures. Most teams and projects fell in between; they were acceptable but not great. Our focus is to review what worked and what did not, and identify lessons learned for future course offerings.