By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the role of labor productivity in promoting economic growth
Analyze the sources of economic growth using the aggregate production function
Measure an economy’s rate of productivity growth
Evaluate the power of sustained growth

Product Design and Development is a project-based course that covers modern tools and methods for product design and development. The cornerstone is a project in which teams of management, engineering, and industrial design students conceive, design and prototype a physical product. Class sessions are conducted in workshop mode and employ cases and hands-on exercises to reinforce the key ideas. Topics include identifying customer needs, concept generation, product architecture, industrial design, and design-for-manufacturing.

In this hands-on undergraduate class, students work in large teams of approximately 15-20 individuals to design and build working alpha prototypes of new products. The course is designed to emulate what engineers might experience as part of a design team in a modern product development firm. The large teams must work effectively to realize this task, so students also learn about group dynamics, team roles and management, consensus building, and the value of communication. 
Each year there is a broad theme which serves as a launching point for new product opportunities. At the end of the course, teams present their work to a live audience of ~1100 practicing product designers, entrepreneurs, academics, and classmates, as well as a significant live webcast audience—in the tens of thousands.
Key Goals:

To improve creative-thinking capability.
To improve ability to identify significant product opportunities, and to develop appropriate solutions through a structured product development process.
To improve expertise in constructing models for reasoning about design alternatives. These include estimations, sketches, sketch models, spreadsheets, geometric models, mockups, and prototypes.
To improve engineering expertise and proficiency in techniques for building high-quality product models and prototypes.
To learn about and experience structured methods for working in large teams on a project that requires teamwork to be successful.
To improve presentation skills using a wide variety of media.
To develop an understanding of, and enthusiasm for, the engineering activities involved with designing a new product.
To develop an appreciation for the significance of societal contributions that can be made as a technological innovator.

Que signifie innover et comment faire ? Pour bien comprendre ce concept, l’UCL met à la disposition de tous « les Zinnovants », une série de capsules vidéos qui répondent, en deux minutes, aux questions-clés à se poser pour innover. Une première étape de l'innovation, c'est l'adoption : comment convaincre les parties prenantes que mon idée est bonne, pas trop risquée, pas trop difficile à mettre en place et compatible avec ce qui existe déjà. Présentées sous forme d’animations illustrées par le cartooniste belge Kanar et bénéficiant du support de Essenscia, le contenu de ces vidéos a été conçu par les professeur Françoise de Viron et Benoît Gailly de la Louvain School of Management (LSM) de l’UCL. Chacune de ces capsules résume, en moins de deux minutes, un des concepts-clés de son cours « stratégie et gestion de l’innovation. /// (EN) Looking for a video to create an exciting powerpoint on innovation? The new Zinnovants episodes are for you!

This activity was designed for blind learners, but all types of learners can use it to understand general steps of setting up and running a small company.

How can we translate real-world challenges into future business opportunities? How can individuals, organizations, and society learn and undergo change at the pace needed to stave off worsening problems? Today, organizations of all kinds—traditional manufacturing firms, those that extract resources, a huge variety of new start-ups, services, non-profits, and governmental organizations of all types, among many others—are tackling these very questions. For some, the massive challenges of moving towards sustainability offer real opportunities for new products and services, for reinventing old ones, or for solving problems in new ways. The course aims to provide participants with access and in-depth exposure to firms that are actively grappling with the sustainability-related issues through cases, readings and guest speakers.

This course addresses the practical challenges of making an established company entrepreneurial and examines various roles related to corporate entrepreneurship. Outside speakers complement faculty lectures.

This seminar will explore the purposes and development of Technology Roadmaps for systematically mapping out possible development paths for various technological domains and the industries that build on them. Data of importance for such roadmaps include rates of innovation, key bottlenecks, physical limitations, improvement trendlines, corporate intent, and value chain and industry evolutionary paths. The course will build on ongoing work on the MIT Communications Technology Roadmap project, but will explore other domains selected from Nanotechnology, Bio-informatics, Geno/Proteino/Celleomics, Neurotechnology, Imaging & Diagnostics, etc. Thesis and Special Project opportunities will be offered.

Working as if they were engineers, students design and construct model solar sails made of aluminum foil to move cardboard tube satellites through “space” on a string. Working in teams, they follow the engineering design thinking steps—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, redesign—to design and test small-scale solar sails for satellites and space probes. During the process, learn about Newton’s laws of motion and the transfer of energy from wave energy to mechanical energy. A student activity worksheet is provided.

D-Lab World Prosthetics is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Jaipur Foot Organization to improve the design, manufacture, and distribution of rehabilitation devices in the developing world. The course welcomes individuals interested in physical rehabilitation to work on multidisciplinary teams of students with bioengineering, mechanical engineering, material science, and medical or pre-medical backgrounds. Students will learn about the basics of human walking, different types of gait disabilities, as well as the technologies that seek to address those disabilities. Patient perspectives and current research areas are presented. Lecture topics focus on lower-limb disabilities, including polio and above-knee and below-knee amputation, and will cover both developed and developing world techniques for overcoming these disabilities. Students form teams to design and prototype low-cost orthotic and prosthetic devices, and present their work at the end of the course.

Strengthening Innovative Library Leaders (SILL) is a 2-day foundational leadership training curriculum for librarians. The training was developed at the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs in partnership with librarians around the world. The project is funded by the Global Libraries Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

SILL is designed for public and community librarians, but can be used with other groups. This leadership training is meant to be delivered to everyone in the library, not just a select few. Equally important is that it is developed to be used by trainers with different levels of training experience and familiarity with the topic. Most importantly, it was designed to be easily adapted to the local library context and translated into different languages.

The training is divided into 4 interactive modules focusing on Leadership, Innovation, Planning, and Communication.

This book is suited for the Entrepreneurship or Innovation course with an emphasis on Sustainability or for a course devoted entirely to Sustainability.

What are the trends and forces underlying the changing character of the business-environment relationship? How they are creating significant entrepreneurial opportunities for individuals and companies? Around the world, the movement toward “sustainable development” has caused many firms to adopt policies and practices that reflect what is sometimes called a “sustainable business” or “triple bottom line” approach. “Triple bottom line” refers to the demonstration of strong performance across economic, social, and environmental indicators. Those measures serve as indicators of fiduciary responsibility to a growing set of concerned investors and therefore can help ensure access to capital. They also enable innovators to lower costs, create strategic differentiation, reduce risk, and position themselves for competitive advantage over rivals less attuned to trends.

The deep roots of sustainability thinking are now evident in widespread and increasingly visible activities worldwide, and Sustainability, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship explores this evolution; its necessity, its implications and its progression.

Systems Engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem including operations, performance, test, manufacturing, cost, and schedule. This subject emphasizes the links of systems engineering to fundamentals of decision theory, statistics, and optimization. It also introduces the most current, commercially successful techniques for systems engineering.

This course provides a series of strategic frameworks for managing high-technology businesses. The emphasis throughout the course is on the development and application of conceptual models which clarify the interactions between competition, patterns of technological and market change, and the structure and development of organizational capabilities.
This is not a course in how to manage product or process development. The main focus is on the acquisition of a set of powerful analytical tools which are critical for the development of a technology strategy as an integral part of business strategy. These tools can provide the framework for deciding which technologies to invest in, how to structure those investments and how to anticipate and respond to the behavior of competitors, suppliers, and customers. The course should be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business for which technology is likely to play a major role, and to those interested in consulting or venture capital.

This course provides you with a framework to understand the structure and dynamics of high-tech businesses, together with an approach for their effective strategic management. It is focused on domains in which systems are important, because either or both products are parts of larger and more complex systems, or they are comprised of systems. The domains covered include computing, communications (in particular the mobile and IP domains), consumer electronics, industrial networking, automotive, aerospace and medical devices. The course will be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business in which technology will likely play a major role, and also to those interested in investing in or providing counsel to these businesses.
The emphasis throughout is on the development and application of ways of thinking or mental models that bring clarity to the complex co-evolution of technological innovation, the demand opportunity, systems architecture, business ecosystems, and decision-making and execution within the business.

What do technology and innovation mean from Africa? This is the central question of this course, which tackles a double absence: Of the meanings and role of technology in African history, on the one hand, and of Africa's place in the global history of technology, on the other. This course alternates between technologies from outside and technologies from within Africa and their itineraries in everyday life, and it is designed to provide students with grounded understandings of technology in Africa for intellectual and action-oriented purposes.

Our linked subjects are (1) the historical process by which the meaning of technology has been constructed, and (2) the concurrent transformation of the environment. To explain the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary public discourse, we will examine responses — chiefly political and literary — to the development of the mechanic arts, and to the linked social, cultural, and ecological transformation of 19th- and 20th-century American society, culture, and landscape.
Note: In the interests of freshness and topicality we regard the STS.464 syllabus as sufficiently flexible to permit some — mostly minor — variations from year to year. One example of a different STS.464 syllabus can be found in STS.464 Cultural History of Technology, Spring 2005.

This course covers how to leverage major technology advances to significantly transform a business in the marketplace. There is a focus on major issues a business must deal with to transform its technical and market strategies successfully, including the organizational and cultural aspects that often cause such business transformations to fail. Class material draws from concrete experiences of IBM's major transformation in the late 1990s, when it aggressively embraced the Internet and came up with its e-business strategy.

This lesson plan introduces students to Thomas Edison's life and inventions. It asks students to compare and contrast life around 1900 with their own lives and helps students understand the connections between the technological advancements of the early twentieth century and contemporary society and culture.