New Course for Higher Ed

Ford got better ideas out of it. It gave BodyMedia an “out-of-BodyMedia” experience. And it is showing universities everywhere why smaller is sometimes better.

It’s an innovative and time-tested course at Carnegie Mellon called Integrated Product Development (IPD), and it’s designed to show students and their corporate sponsors the power of interdisciplinary teamwork.

Essentially, IPD is a microcosm of the approach Carnegie Mellon is using to create the future of higher education. Interdisciplinary education and research have become institutionalized within the university to a higher degree than perhaps anywhere else in the world. For a university of its size, Carnegie Mellon has produced an extraordinary number of innovations that have had a significant impact on the world.

The course has been so successful the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) named it winner of the society’s Curriculum Innovation Award.

Ford was so impressed with prototypes created by the Carnegie Mellon students that the company has patented five of 12 IPD products for the Ford F-150® and the Ford Escape SUV®. BodyMedia got ideas for body monitoring solutions in such diverse areas as infant care, fitness, hydration, hypothermia detection and management, and cardiac care.

The course was taught by the faculty team of Jonathan Cagan, professor of mechanical engineering; Craig Vogel, professor of design; and Laurie Weingart, professor of organizational behavior and theory.

The semester-long class teams engineering students with MBA students and industrial design students to create new products for their corporate sponsors. “Several schools teach this kind of approach to product development,” said Vogel, “but none teach it as completely as we do. Carnegie Mellon is the right size for true collaboration, and it’s simply not that common to find world-class programs in business, engineering and design all within a few hundred feet of each other.”

In their 2002 book Creating Breakthrough Products, Cagan and Vogel claim the approach is the best way to close what they call “The Product Opportunity Gap” between what is now on the market and where trends are leading the market.

“Engineers,” said Cagan, “often skip the ‘understanding the opportunity’ phase. Bringing the marketers, designers and engineers together at the beginning of the process can increase creativity, lower investment costs, shorten production pipelines and teach colleagues with different perspectives how to work better together.

"We may be the first university to receive this award with three faculty from different colleges named as recipients. It helps to confirm that Carnegie Mellon is helping to shape the future of university education. As an industrial design educator, I am honored to be recognized for a contribution to another discipline", Vogel said.

Astro Teller, CEO of BodyMedia said, "We hope the students and the university are as proud of the learning and the work that the students accomplished as we are at BodyMedia.”

For BodyMedia, six teams of students from Carnegie Mellon's School of Design, College of Engineering and Tepper School of Business developed product visions matching a body monitoring opportunity or problem.

“I think the class results prove once again the valuable impact that products developed out of our platform can have in a multitude of commercial segments,” Teller said. “The university and its professors should be congratulated for bringing such real-world, collaborative opportunities to its students. It's a strong example of Carnegie Mellon's interdisciplinary strength and provides a great collaboration vehicle for corporations such as ourselves."

New Course for Higher Ed

Explore