ANN ARBOR — For more than 20 years, the Integrated Product Development course has brought together students and faculty members from different disciplines at the University of Michigan to participate in an innovative product design competition.
The course, organized by the Tauber Institute for Global Operations, is co-taught by Stephanie Tharp, associate professor at UM’s Stamps School of Art & Design, and Evan Svaan, a lecturer at UM’s Ross School of Business.
The culmination of this year’s course was the 2017 IPD Trade Show, which took place in April and featured an exhibition of products from six teams of graduate students from the Stamps School, the Ross School, and UM’s College of Engineering and School of Information.
Each team was required to have at least one member from the four schools in order to work through a variety of important elements of product development — including the process of market research, concept generation and selection, technical development, production process design, pricing, inventory stocking and advertising.
For each course, they come up with a specific product class for the students to focus on. This year, they challenged teams to create a “fully functional, customer-ready accessory that can be worn routinely in daily life, incorporates the use of active technology, and is responsive to user needs in an innovative way.”
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