Product Design Development (OPIM 654)

Faculty

Karl Ulrich, CIBC Professor of Entrepreneurship and e-Commerce, Wharton School
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Course first offered

Spring 1988

Most recently offered

Spring 2010

Course overview

The course provides the student with a number of tools and concepts necessary for creating and managing product development processes. The course consists of two interwoven parts. First, it presents the basic steps that are necessary for moving from a “cool idea” to a product sufficiently mature to launch an entrepreneurial start-up. This includes cases, lectures, and exercises on topics like identifying customer needs, developing a product concept as well as effective prototyping strategies. The capstone of this first part is a real project in which student teams conceptualize and develop a new product or service up to the completion of a fully functional prototype. Second, the course discusses a number of challenges related to product development as encountered by management consultants, and members of cross-functional development teams as well as general managers. The course analyzes several cases related to, among others, resource allocation in R&D organizations, organizational forms of product development teams, as well as managing development projects across large geographic distances.
Format: Lectures, case and problem analyses, group presentations, the development of a new product to the prototype stage.

Course website Note: Link is to a PDF.

University of Pennsylvania