Product Design and Development Course: Bringing Good Things to Light…and Market

March 1, 2004 — Here's the challenge: Come up with a concept for a new lighting product that incorporates LED technology, produce a prototype, set the price and sell your product to a market of your peers.

Working in teams of 3-5, students in two sections of EMTM's Product Design and Development course brought their prototypes "to market" in a design fair that took place on the last day of the second term, Saturday, February 21.

Only the course instructors — Karl Ulrich, Wharton associate professor of operations and information management, and David Ellison, a former Wharton faculty member now with Monitor Company — knew what each team was working on.

After assigning the task at the beginning of the term, Ulrich met with each team mid-way through the course. At this stage, they needed to have completed an analysis of customer needs, outlined a set of concept alternatives and selected the concept they intended to pursue. The next stage involved engineering a prototype, estimating the manufacturing cost and determining a pricing strategy, as well as producing compelling display and marketing materials.

Speed to market…from concept to prototype
The entire cycle, from assignment to concept to prototype market, took place in the span of 12 weeks (6 program weekends). While the projects were proceeding, the course covered key aspects of how to turn innovative ideas into commercially viable products. Case studies, readings and class discussions addressed issues such as identifying opportunities and customer needs; industrial design; concept generation and concept testing; patents and intellectual property; robust design and experimentation; and development teams and organizations.

"Projects work particularly well in the EMTM program," says Ulrich, "because students can experiment with their own problem-solving styles in the relatively low-risk environment of the class. The projects also serve to reinforce the key principles of effective product development, which seem less likely to sink in if only described in a lecture."

Teams collaborated between weekends through teleconferences and the use of Wharton's webCafé, a customized suite of online tools and eRooms used by the EMTM program. Ulrich and Ellison also used webCafé to communicate with the entire class and with individual teams, providing feedback along the way.

The day of reckoning:
Not surprisingly, when you combine engineering backgrounds with an interest in business, some inventive concepts can emerge. If it had been the week before Christmas, you could have done serious "something for everyone" shopping. Everything from "Stim U Light" (touch-sensitive units for places like utility drawers, lighting up the contents only when you open the drawer), to "Running Lights" (knitted caps with mini-lights, designed for novelty and safety to help parents see their children playing outside in the dark), to "Litini" (martini glasses with their stems illuminated by glowing lights of various colors).

Products were judged by fellow students, EMTM faculty/staff and other passersby. Using color-coded ballots (to distinguish participating students from 'unbiased' buyers), you selected the one product that you would be most likely to purchase at the advertised price. You could also indicate up to five other products that you strongly considered selecting.

And the winners are…
In the end, winning didn't come down to simply capturing the highest number of sales. In fact, the winning product was not the most popular item (although it was second in a field of 23), and the most popular item based on sales came in seventh in terms of total profit.

The object of the project (and the course) was to examine all the variables that come into play when determining how profitable a product might be, including unit production costs and retail price.

The winner? Look for "Glow Darts" coming soon to your favorite pub, or available for your personal recreation room. The EMTM team of Mikhail Maiorov (whose real job is with Princeton Lightwave), Vladimir Tamarkin (Infinicon Systems), and John Woodburn (Johnson & Johnson / McNeil) came up with an idea that had product appeal and profit potential.

An ingenious use of the LED technology, the dart board and darts are engineered so that a dart striking anywhere on the board will light up briefly, then fade. But a bull's eye dart stays lit continuously…a concept that clearly turned out to be on target for this market.

"We all came from classical engineering backgrounds, and had never done something like this from beginning to end," says Woodburn, a manager of systems engineering. "We knew we wanted it to have a 'coolness' factor and be interactive. Working together as a team — and applying the disciplined process set up by the assignment — we came up with a much better, more refined idea than if we'd been individual inventors brainstorming on our own…. It really crystallized the lessons of the course."