9529140 SEERING This award establishes a new Engineering Research Center, the Center for Competitive Product Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The award initiates a potential 11-year life span with a new five-year cooperative agreement, renewable in the third and sixth years of the center's operation. The vision of the Center is to develop methods, procedures, and software tools to improve the product development process. The product development process is the critical industrial procedure for bringing new and innovative products to market. The challenge is to improve methods to guide the complexity of product development. The process is performed by teams from an array of organizational units, with participants having a diversity of skills and perspectives. From the perspective of the marketplace and engineering, this vision is very important. The success or failure of products into the marketplace depends on the details of how engineers translate their understanding of customer needs and desires and business practices into product specifications. To provide a systems perspective, the research on the product development process is organized into three thrusts: (1) customer/engineering interface, (2) product family strategy, and (3) organization of the product development process. The research output of the joint industry/engineering/business teams will take the practical form of improved product development methods, techniques, and tools. These will be developed from research on challenging problems faced by their industrial partners. In education, the Center will create a new educational experience for MIT undergraduate and graduate students, first-hand involvement in the product development. In addition, the Center intends to curricular material to improve the training of engineering and management students for industry in order to produce a new generation of engineers and managers, skilled efficient and co mmercially successful product development and design. The ERC will help develop a major in product development for the MBA degree offered by the Sloan School of Management. In addition, the Center will help develop a new professional engineering degree in product development, which the Engineering School will offer. The ERC will collaborate with industrial partners in offering courses for product development processes for their on-site training programs. In outreach, the Center will provide biennial conferences for faculty in U.S. engineering and business schools interested in product development. The ERC also will introduce the principles and excitement of competition to minority high school students through the MIT Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science Program. Professor Woodie Flowers, a member of the ERC, will create an alliance for the ERC with U.S. First, a nonprofit organization. This ERC is an interdisciplinary partnership between the MIT's School of Engineering and the Sloan School of Management. Dr. Warren Seering, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering will be the Director of the Center. Dr. John Hauser, a Professor of Marketing in the Sloan School of Management, will serve as Associate Director. The research team is multidisciplinary, with strong collaboration between faculty in MIT's engineering and business schools. The strong support of MIT for the Center is demonstrated by active cooperation among deans and faculties of the engineering and management schools. Product development is a central core of MIT's strategy for the continued improvement of engineering and business education. MIT will construct a new facility to house a state-of- the-art prototyping facility for product development process research. ***
