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Enabling and Characterizing Entrepreneurial Successes in New Product Development Teams

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the methods we use to promote entrepreneurship and characterize successful student teams in two undergraduate courses and one graduate course on New Product Development. These courses aim to develop the age-appropriate skills required for successful product development in today’s competitive marketplace. To accomplish a truly multidisciplinary dimension, the graduate course is cross-listed in three UC Berkeley Colleges as ME290P (Architecture and Engineering), BUS290N (Business), and IS290P (School of Information) and at the California College of the Arts as CCA INDU0432. Students from all of these Colleges join forces on small product development teams to step through the new product development process in detail, learning about the available tools and techniques to execute each process step along the way. Each student brings his or her own disciplinary perspective to the team effort, and must learn to synthesize that perspective with those of the other students in the group to develop a sound, marketable product. Students depart the semester understanding new product development processes as well as useful tools, techniques and organizational structures that support new product development practice. Our graduate course is relatively unique at UC Berkeley in the extent to which it accommodates a balanced representation of both faculty and students from across the disciplines. We have refined the course over the years with updated curricular material, the introduction of design coaches from industry, speakers from industry, and participation of faculty and students from the California College of the Arts. The undergraduate courses follow a similar philosophy but are aimed at the skill set and needs of freshmen and seniors. In our classes we use a range of instruments and methods to promote and evaluate the effectiveness of the teamwork and success of the final products. In this paper, we summarize our methods for team skills, management, feedback and evaluation. We provide case studies of teams that have taken the next step in developing products after course completion. We analyzed factors that are associated with these successful entrepreneurial teams using: questionnaires, ranking by industry judges, personality profiles and instructor observations. Factors considered include personality type, creativity climate, discipline mix, participation in other entrepreneurial classes, participation in business plan/ technology competitions and success in obtaining outside funding.

Keywords: new product development, multifunctional teams, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship assessment, entrepreneurial skills

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Agogino, A., & Beckman, S., & Speer, L. (2007, June), Enabling And Characterizing Entrepreneurial Successes In New Product Development Teams Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2220