This award funds a joint education project between the Engineering Research Center for Innovation in Product Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM). This consortium is developing a Product Development Leadership Program that will confer a Master of Science degree in Product Devlopment. The MS will be a duel degree between engineering and management, and is designed to help experienced technical professionals move into product development leadership and management positions. The ultimate goal of this project is to deploy the MS in Product Development degree in many universities across the nation in order to have a significant impact on the American product development workforce. Each institution offering such a degree, including the three institutions currently involved in the project and those to be added later, must share a common vision, definition of concepts, and language. A successful collaboration between the three schools involved will ensure that an MS in Product Development from MIT is comparable to one from UDM, which is in turn comparable to one from RIT. The Master's degree program is 24 months long, and will allow enrolled students to continue to work at their companies. Students will attend classes at the campus in which they are enrolled for short periods of time, and will complete most of the course work through distance learning.
