courses

The course targets non-engineering majors interested in understanding engineering approaches to product fabrication. The course covers a broad variety of engineering topics including mechanical, electrical, computer and material science. Many of these topics would normally be full courses in themselves. This course intends to teach familiarity with a focus on hands-on practice as applied to products. Students will briefly use equipment such as materials testing machines, mills, lathes, oscilloscopes, laser cutters, photodiodes, motors, servos, microcomputers as well as engineering software such as Solidworks, C compilers, Labview, Matlab, and Cambridge Engineering Selector. The class concludes with independent projects.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The creation of a successful product requires the integration of design, engineering, and marketing. The purpose of this intensive studio course is to introduce basic concepts in the design of three-dimensional products. For purposes of the course, design is understood as a creative act of synthesis expressed through various modes of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional representation. The course develops basic design skills ranging from hand sketching to the use of digital modeling software and rapid prototyping. Fulfills the requirement for a design background course in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Integrated Product Design (IPD).

Activity: Studio

1 Course Unit

Engineers and scientists create and lead great companies, hiring managers when and where needed to help execute their vision. Designed expressly for students having a keen interest in technological innovation, this course investigates the roles of inventors and founders in successful technology ventures. Through case studies and guest speakers, we introduce the knowledge and skills needed to recognize and seize a high-tech entrepreneurial opportunity – be it a product or service – and then successfully launch a startup or spin-off company. The course studies key areas of intellectual property, its protection and strategic value; opportunity analysis and concept testing; shaping technology driven inventions into customer-driven products; constructing defensible competitive strategies; acquiring resources in the form of capital, people and strategic partners; and the founder’s leadership role in an emerging high-tech company. Throughout the course emphasis is placed on decisions faced by founders, and on the sequential risks and determinants of success in the early growth phase of a technology venture. The course is designed for, but not restricted to, students of engineering and applied science and assumes no prior business education.

Prerequisite: Third or Fourth year or Graduate standing

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course is aimed at providing current and future product design/development engineers, manufacturing engineers, and product development managers with an applied understanding of Design for Manufacturability (DFM) concepts and methods. The course content includes materials from multiple disciplines including: engineering design, manufacturing, marketing, finance, project management, and quality systems.

Prerequisites: MEAM 101 or equivalent, MEAM 210 or equivalent, Senior or Graduate standing in the School of Design, Engineering, or Business with completed product development and/or design engineering core coursework or related experience.

Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course provides tools and methods for creating new products. The course is intended for students with a strong career interest in new product development , entrepreneurship, and/or technology development. The course follows an overall product design methodology, including the identification of customer needs, generation of product concepts, prototyping, and design-for-manufacturing. Weekly student assignments are focused on the design of a new product and culminate in the creation of a prototype, which is launched at an end-of-semester public Design Fair. The course project is a physical good – but most of the tools and methods apply to services and software products.

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This studio is structured for IPD students as an intensive, interdisciplinary exploration of Design as purposeful for Integrated Product Design. The goal of the studio is to give students a firsthand experience of various processes involved in creating successful integrated product designs. This first semester of the four-semester studio sequence focuses on giving students experience developing designs based on a range of starting points: form, function, materiality and manufacturing process. Students will practice design through rigorous, consistent processes for thinking through the evolution of their ideas. In this course, they will go through an entire design process from conceptualization to design to producing prototypes. They will be taught to focus on the specifics of their designs, causing them to be conscious of what drives their choices as designers and providing them with a wider range of tools to design from in successive projects. Course work will involve readings, assignments, class participation, in-class exercises, a mid-term presentation and a final submission.
One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

In the second semester of the four-semester studio sequence, we ask students to take a step back from what and how they are designing and ask the question of why they are designing it. We will teach them a rigorous process for understanding stakeholder needs and for translating those needs into implications for product design. They will begin to develop greater awareness of the personal, social, competitive and technological contexts that their products fit into, and to learn how to design for those contexts. They will develop the ability to dive into a topic and frame a design problem, and to understand the implications of how they frame the problem on what they design. Ideally, they will use this process to identify a problem or opportunity to work on for their final project. Course work will involve readings, assignments, class participation, in-class exercises, and a final submission.
Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The last two semesters of the IPD studio sequence consist of the IPD Final Project. Students are given the opportunity to work on design problems that follow their passion or to work on a real world problem provided by our partners in academia, industry, or the non-profit world. The Final Project enables students to put the skills that they have developed in engineering, design arts and business into practice, following the process from initial opportunity identification into the development of a working product with a complementary business plan. Interdisciplinary group work is encouraged on final projects. Working in teams offers students the opportunity to collaborate across skill sets and learn from teammates from different disciplines. Final Projects provide students with ample opportunity to learn leadership and collaboration skills that are invaluable in today’s workplace.
One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Needfinding is an approach that puts people and their needs at the center of product development and business strategy creation. Over 90% of new products introduced into the marketplace fail. A good portion of these failures are due to lack of understanding of end consumers and their needs. To develop truly successful new products, it’s not enough just to ask people what they need or want. Designers and engineers need tools and techniques to get beyond what people can explicitly state and determine their implicit needs. Needfinding is an approach for developing deep insights that provide strategic direction for corporations and open up new possibilities for product development. In this class students will gain a toolset from which to develop their own approaches to conducting researching for design: learning how to think about other people, about culture, and about new perspectives. They will also learn tactical skills: how to define research questions, how to conduct observations and interviews, how to interpret results, how to synthesize them into fodder for design, and how to communicate their findings in a way that is compelling and actionable for designers, marketers, and business strategists. This class is designed for graduate students and upper level undergraduates with a specific interest in product design or design thinking.
Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Human Factors and Ergonomics knowledge is a critical component of a product designer or design engineer’s toolbox. This course teaches the direct application of existing human factors/ergonomic data to the creation of new product designs. Applying human factors knowledge to problem solving for product design happens throughout the design process. It is a useful input as initial ideas begin to ut and as a way to verify completed concepts through directly documented user testing and design iteration. The course would be a mini-lecture/studio style course in which the students will work in class on assigned projects, finding, analyzing, extrapolating and applying data to design solutions and creating mockups, model and prototypes for user testing of their designs.
One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Creating new product concepts was once a specialized pursuit exclusively performed by design professionals in isolation from the rest of an organization. Today’s products are developed in a holistic process involving a collaboration amount many disciplines. Design thinking – incorporating processes, approaches, and working methods from traditional designers’ toolkits – has become a way of generating innovative ideas to challenging problems and refining those ideas. Rapid prototyping techniques, affordable and accessible prototyping platforms, and an iterative mindset have enabled people to more reliably translate those ideas into implementable solutions. In this course, students will be exposed to these techniques and learn how to engage in a human-centered design process.
One-term course offered either term
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

Today’s children enjoy a wide array of play experiences, with stories, learning, characters and games that exist as physical stand-alone objects or toys enhanced with electronics or software. In this course, students will explore the domain of play and learning in order to develop original proposals for new product experiences that are at once tangible, immersive and dynamic. They will conduct research into education and psychology while also gaining hands-on exposure to new product manifestations in a variety of forms, both physical and digital. Students will be challenged to work in teams to explore concepts, share research and build prototypes of their experiences in the form of static objects that may have accompanying electronic devices or software. Final design proposals will consider future distribution models for product experiences such as 3D printing, virtual reality and software- hardware integration. Instruction will be part seminar and part workshop, providing research guidance and encouraging connections will subject matter experts throughout the Penn campus.

Also Offered As: IPD 521

Course usually offered in fall term
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

This course provides a platform, in the form of furniture, to execute and deploy architectural & engineering principles. It will be conducted as a seminar and workshop, and will introduce students to a variety of design methodologies that are unique to product design. The course will engage in many of the considerations that are affiliated with CAD/CAM production, the appropriate and innovative use of materials, and human factors. Students conduct case studies and research into industrial design processes, and will adapt these processes into techniques for designing a chair. Throughout the semester, students will experience first hand structural and material behavior, and understand ergonomic constraints by testing their design at different scales. The process will include: the production of a final design, its detailing, prototype development, Color/Material/Finishes (CMF), design for Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), the possibility of mass customization, research of materials and fabrication methods, optimization studies, Computer Aided Design (CAD), model making, furniture case studies, and a site visit to a major furniture manufacturer.
Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

This course provides an introduction to the ideas and techniques of Industrial Design, which operates between Engineering and Marketing as the design component of Integrated Product Development. The course is intended for students from engineering, design, or business with an interest in multi-disciplinary, needs-based product design methods. It will follow a workshop model, combining weekly lectures on design manufacturing, with a progressive set of design exercises.
Course usually offered in fall term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course was designed to explore intersections of functionality and performance using an experimental platform to uncover opportunities within the built environment to create domestic products. Provides practical insights into the material manipulation and aesthetic experimentation that are essential for the design and fabrication of products. Lectures and case studies help students to learn from examples and develop their own designs. Through a series of exercises, students design and fabricate a prototype using actual materials. The course addresses problems unique to product design, such as scale, weight, cost and production.
Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

A seminar and design workshop that explores associative and parametric CAD-CAM strategies, to enable an interactive continuity between conception and fabrication. Through parametric 3D constructions, students will explore how to link dink different aspects of the architectural projects, such as: (1) design intention; (2) control of variation and adaptation; (3) construction constraints; (4) digital fabrication processes. The course emphasizes the cross-fertilization of formal, technical and performative aspects of the design activity.
Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

This course is a research-based design studio that introduces new materials, fabrication, and prototyping techniques to develop a series of design proposals in response to the theme: Biological Design. The studio introduces life sciences and biotechnologies to designers, artists, and non-specialists to develop creative and critical propositions that address the social, cultural, and environmental needs of the 21st century. The course will be a pilot study of the first biodesign challenge organized by CUT/PASTE/GROW. The final projects will be submitted to a competition and the winning entry will be featured at Biofabricate in Summer 2017.
One-term course offered either term
Activity: Studio
1 Course Unit

This course will provide students who have taken a course in product design, needfinding, or design thinking an opportunity to further develop these skills in a real world application. The course will center around a semester-long, team based project where each term with work to solve a problem presented to them by the client, as well as a series of three individual prototyping skills-based assignments. This course will provide students who are interested in Product Design more hands on and applied experience.

Prerequisite: (any of the following) OIDD 415/515, IPD 515, MEAM 415, MKTG 262, MKTG 853, IPD 509, or ARCH 725

Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The aim of this course is to understand the new medium of architecture within the format of a research seminar. The subject matter of new media is to be examined and placed in a disciplinary trajectory of building designed and construction technology that adapts to material and digital discoveries. We will also build prototype with the new media, and establish a disciplinary knowledge for ourselves. The seminar is interested in testing the architecture-machine relationship, moving away from architecture that looks like machines into architecture that behaves like machines: An intelligence (based on the conceptual premise of a project and in the design of a system), as part of a process (related to the generative real of architecture) and as the object itself and its embedded intelligence.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The critical parameter will be to develop the potential beyond finite forms of explicit and parametric modeling towards non-linear algorithmic processes. We will seek novel patterns of organization, structure, and articulation as architectural expressions within the emergent properties of feedback loops and rule based systems. This seminar will accommodate both introductory and advanced levels. No previous scripting experience is necessary. It will consist of a series of introductory sessions, obligatory intensive workshops, lectures followed by suggested readings, and will gradually focus on individual projects. Students will be encouraged to investigate the limits of algorithmic design both theoretically and in practice through a scripting environment.
Notes: only offered in Fall
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course will examine the ecological nature of design at a range of scales, from the most intimate aspects of product design to the largest infrastructures, from the use of water in bathroom to the flow of traffic on the highway. It is a first principle of ecological design that everything is connected, and that activities at one scale can have quite different effects at other scales, so the immediate goal of the course will be to identify useful and characteristic modes of analyzing the systematic, ecological nature of design work, from the concept of the ecological footprint to market share. The course will also draw on the history and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now characterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization.
Notes: usually offered in Fall
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Usually offered in the Spring
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The pursuit of immersive digital experiences has long been a goal of the computing industry. Early wearable displays designed in the 1960s depicted simple three dimensional graphics in ways that had never been seen before. Through trial and error, digital pioneers reframed the relationship between user and machine, and over the last five decades, have made strides that advanced both the input and output mechanisms we are so comfortable with today. As a field, architecture has been reliant on these advancements to design and document buildings, but these tools still leave the architect removed from the physicality of the design, with their work depicted as 2D lines or 3D planes alone. This course will study the evolutionary advancements made that now allow us to fully inhabit digital worlds through Virtual Reality. Using the HTC Vive and Unreal Engine, students will generate immersive, photorealistic models of unbuilt architectural works and explore digital/physical interactivity. From the terraces of Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway to Boullees Cenotaph for Newton, the goal of this course is to breathe new life into places and spaces that have, until this time, never been built or occupied.
Usually offered in the Fall
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

Usually offered in the Fall
Activity: Seminar
1 Course Unit

Last century, the digital revolution transformed every aspect of our lives. It shaped every design discipline and defined the ways we imagine and fabricate anything from images to everyday products to clothing, cars, buildings and megacities. Today, design is going through other technical and conceptual revolutions. We design with biotechnologies, fall in love in Virtual Reality with AI bots, rent our cognitive labor through cryptocurrencies. Our creative capabilities, on the other hand, are bounded by a polluted, over-crowded, and resource-constrained planet that is suffering major income and educational inequality. Design After the Digital interrogates the role of design for this century. The seminar surveys the conceptual and technical developments in the past decade to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of design, science and technology. We will study how new design and fabrication methods shape what eat, what we wear, how we form opinions and express ourselves. The goal will be to develop new literacies of design that will help us acclimate better to the new century as creative and critical citizens that can shape its products and values.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to creative ways to use color, typography, and layout across new materials and media, ranging from print to physical objects. Students will explore visual design through a set of assignments and projects that are geared towards exploring the role of design in visual arts, interaction design, media design and architecture. The course introduces a number of design concepts such as content organization, navigation, interaction and data-driven design and show ways to develop new design metaphors, presentation techniques, and imagery using old and new technologies. course is structured as a combination of lectures and hands on workshops where students will have the chance to work both individually and collaboratively to realize their projects.

Practicum provides a real world experience for students interested in solving design problems for non-profit and community organizations. The studio works with two clients each semester, and previous projects have included print design, web design, interpretive signage and exhibit interactives. All projects are real and will result in a portfolio-ready finished product. Students will participate in a full design experience including design, client interaction, presentations, production, and project management. In addition, students will take field trips, meet professionals and go on studio visits.

Art of the Web: Interactive concepts for art and design is a first step in learning how to create, analyze and discuss interactive content, as a visual creator. It is an exploration of the culture of the internet, the ideas behind its quirks, the dreams and freedoms it encapsulates, and the creative power it gives to us. Students will be assigned projects that will challenge their current understanding of the web, and the ways it shapes human connectivity and interaction. Upon completion of this course, students will possess a working knowledge how to organize and design websites and learn to critique web-content including navigation, UX design and information architecture. The course will require analytical and conceptual skills and foster creative thinking.

This course is an introduction to the fundamental perception, representation, aesthetics, and design that shape today’s visual culture. It addresses the way artists and designers create images; design with analog and digital tools; communicate, exchange, and express meaning over broad range of media; and find their voices within the fabric of contemporary art, design, and visual culture. Emphasis is placed on building an extended form of visual literacy by studying and making images using a variety of representation techniques; learning to organize and structure two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, and designing with time-based and procedural media. Students learn to develop an individual style of idea-generation, experimentation, iteration, and critique as part of their creative and critical responses to visual culture.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Students will develop a comprehensive knowledge of how virtual worlds are constructed using contemporary computer graphics technique with a fine arts perspective. The course will offer the opportunity to explore the construction, texturing, and rendering of forms, environments, and mechanisms while conforming to modeling specifications required for animation, real-time simulations or gaming environments, and rapid prototyping.

Prerequisite: FNAR 523 and FNAR 636

Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Information Design and Visualization is an introductory course that explores the structures of information (text, numbers, images, sounds, video, etc.) and presents strategies for designing effective visual communication appropriate for various users and audiences. The course seeks to articulate a vocabulary of information visualization and find new design forms for an increasingly complex culture.

This course introduces advanced topics related to contemporary media technologies, ranging from social media to mobile phones applications and urban interfaces. Students learn how to use new methods from interaction design, service design, and social media and work towards prototyping their ideas using new platforms and media. The class will cover a range of topics such as such as online-gaming, viral communication, interface culture, networked environments, internet of things and discuss their artistic, social, and cultural implications to the public domain.

This course will teach students to design and build sensing installations that engage with real-time urban environmental stimuli. Using the Arduino microcontroller as a prototyping platform, students will write code and wire circuits, learn to select and implement available sensors, and generate raw environmental data. Students will populate databases and interpret data streams, and then create responsive interventions. Following the model of hacker spaces around the globe, we will collaboratively pose problems and find solutions, teaching and learning from one another.

The majority of today’s engineered products move through an advanced computer-aided workflow which greatly speeds design and process time. This course will explore the fundamental components of this workflow through a combination of lectures, hands-on exercises, and a semester design project. General course topics include: fundamental design principles, project definition and needfinding, advanced computer-aided design, rapid prototyping techniques, computer-controlled machining, and an in-depth exploration of the modern analysis and simulation tools that have revolutionized the way in which products are designed. Enrollment is limited.

Prerequisites: MEAM 101, MEAM 150, and MEAM 210, or graduate standing in the School of Engineering, Design, or Wharton with similar experience.

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Lecture

1 Course Unit

Students will learn about problems faced by disabled persons and medical rehabilitation specialists, and how engineering design can be used to solve and ameliorate those problems. The course combines lectures, multiple design projects and exercises, and field trips to clinical rehabilitation facilities. Students will have substantial interaction with clinical faculty, as well as with patients.

Also Offered As: BE 514
Prerequisite: Graduate students or permission of the instructor

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course is aimed at providing current and future product design/development engineers, manufacturing engineers, and product development managers with an applied understanding of Design for Manufacturability (DFM) concepts and methods. The course content includes materials from multiple disciplines including: engineering design, manufacturing, marketing, finance, project management, and quality systems.

Prerequisites: MEAM 101 or equivalent, MEAM 210 or equivalent, Senior or Graduate standing in the School of Design, Engineering, or Business with completed product development and/or design engineering core coursework or related experience

Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course combines performance art and advanced mechatronics concepts that include the design and implementation of large-scale actuation, advanced sensing, actuation and control. This course pairs design school and engineering students to form interdisciplinary teams that together design and build electro-mechanical reactive spaces and scenic/architectural elements in the context of the performing arts. The two disciplinary groups will be treated separately and receive credit for different courses (ARCH746 will be taught concurrently and in some cases co-located) as they will be learning different things. Engineering students gain design sensibilities and advanced mechatronics in the form of networked embedded processing and protocols for large scale actuation and sensing. Design students learn elementary mechatronics and design reactive architectures and work with engineering students to build them. The class will culminate in a some artistic performance (typically with professional artists) such as a Shakespeare play, robotic ballet, a mechatronic opera.

Prerequisite: MEAM 510 (Mechatronics) or equivalent

Course usually offered in spring term
Course usually offered in spring term

The use of distributed wireless sensor networks has surged in popularity in recent years with applications ranging from environmental monitoring, to people- and object-tracking in both cooperative and hostile environments. This course is targeted at understanding and obtaining hands-on experience with the state-of-the-art in such wireless sensor networks which are often composed using relatively inexpensive sensor nodes that have low power consumption, low processing power and bandwidth. The course will span a variety of topics ranging from radio communications, network stack, systems infrastructure including QoS support and energy management, programming paradigms, distributed algorithms and example applications. Some guest lectures may be given.

Prerequisites: CIS 120, ESE 350 or equivalent, one course in computer networks and Senior or Graduate standing.

One-term course offered either term
Senior or Graduate standing
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Also Offered As: ESE 519
One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The objective of this course is to introduce students to a more conceptual, creative, and meaningful approach to creating interactive functional objects utilizing analog, digital, and electronic skillsets acquired through the core engineering curriculum. This course will cover basics of design as an art form, wearables design, electronic sensors, and creating connected devices. Students will be challenged to create 3 pieces of work both individually and in teams culminating in a gallery show of the students’ work.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

In many modern systems, mechanical elements are tightly coupled with electronic components and embedded computers. Mechatronics is the study of how these domains are interconnected, and this hands-on, project-based course provides an integrated introduction to the fundamental components within each of the three domains, including: mechanical elements (prototyping, materials, actuators and sensors, transmissions, and fundamental kinematics), electronics(basic circuits, filters, op amps, discrete logic, and interfacing with mechanielements), and computing (interfacing with the analog world, microprocessor technology, basic control theory, and programming).

Prerequisite: Graduate standing in engineering or permission of the instructor.

Course usually offered in fall term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Three-Dimensional Geometry: Introduction to Reference Frames, Geometry of Rotations of Reference Frames and of Vectors, Euler Angle, Axis-Angle Representations, Properties of Rotation Matrices. Kinematics: Kinematics of Rigid-Body Motion, Rotations, Angular Velocity and Acceleration, Linear Velocity and Acceleration, Applications to Planar Linkage Analysis. Constraints: Configuration Space, Holonomic and Non-holonomic Constraints, Degrees of Freedom, Tests for Holonomic versus Non-holonomic Constraints, Generalized Coordinates, Generalized Speeds, Partial Speeds, Partial Velocities, Principle of Virtual Work for Holonomic and Non-holonomic systems. Constraint Forces: Virtual Work, D’Alembert Equations, Lagrange’s Equations for Non-holonomic systems. Distribution of Mass: Center-of-Mass, Vector and Scalar Moments of Inertia. Vector Spaces: Operators, Dyads, Dyadic, Moment-of-Inertia Tensor, Rigid Bodies. Dynamics: Kinetic Energy and Angular Momentum, Lagrangian/Hamiltonian Mechanics and Conservation Laws, Poisson Brackets and Constants of the Motion, Kane-Lagrange Equations with Non-Holonomic Constraints, Kane-Lagrange Equations, Null Spaces and Computing Constraint Forces. Variational Calculus: The Principle of Least Action, A Study of Small Perturbations and Linear Stability Analysis.

Prerequisites: MEAM 211 and some Linear Algebra. Senior or Master’s Standing in Engineering or permission of the instructor.

Course usually offered in fall term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

In “Controlling the World”, students will fabricate their own IoT board, complete with microcontroller, network, and sensors that connects with real-world cloud services. Additionally, the class will focus on a comprehensive analysis and creation of a custom bootloader for over the air firmware updates, a critical addition for any modern electronic device and will also dive deep into Altium, an electronics CAD package, that will expose students to rapid IoT focused circuit design and prototyping. Finally, each student’s device will be linked up to the cloud for data logging, control, and automation. We’ll discuss all things Cloud, Edge, and Fog, as well as trends in the embedded industry. Field trips will supplement these lectures, with travel to local businesses succeeding in the IoT realm. When the course is through, each student will have completed an accelerated electronics product cycle in the Internet of Things and will have the power to deploy their custom device with web capabilities.

Prerequisite: ESE350, ESE 519 or undergraduate background in microcontrollers

Notes: usually offered in Spring
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The goal of Machine Learning is to build computer systems that can adapt and learn from their experience. In recent years we have seen a surge of applications that make use of machine learning technologies and one can argue that Machine learning has been essential to the success of many recent technologies, from natural language technologies (Siri, search technology, automated advertising, text correction) to computer vision technologies (image recognition applications, autonomous vehicles), genomics, medical diagnosis, social network analysis, and many others. This course will introduce some of the key machine learning methods that have proved valuable and successful in practical applications. We will discuss some of the foundational questions in machine learning in order to get a good understanding of the basic issues in this area, and present the main paradigms and techniques needed to obtain successful performance in application areas such as natural language and text understanding, speech recognition, computer vision, data mining, adaptive computer systems and others. The main body of the course will review several supervised and (semi/un)supervised learning approaches. These include methods for learning linear representations, decision-tree methods, Bayesian methods, kernel based methods and neural networks methods, as well as clustering, dimensionality reduction and reinforcement learning methods. We will also discuss how to model problems as machine learning problems, how to evaluate learning algorithms, and how to deal with some real-world issues such as noisy data, and domain adaptation.

Prerequisite: CIS 121

Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course will cover core subject matter common to the fields of robotics, character animation and embodied intelligent agents. The intent of the course is to provide the student with a solid technical foundation for developing, animating and controlling articulated systems used in interactive computer games, virtual reality simulations and high-end animation applications. The course balances theory with practice by “looking under the hood” of current games, animation systems and authoring tools and exams the technologies and techniques used from both a computer science and engineering perspective. Topics covered include: geometric coordinate systems and transformations; quaternions; parametric curves and surfaces; forward and inverse kinematics; dynamic systems and control; computer simulation; keyframe, motion capture and procedural animation; behavior-based animation and control; facial animation; smart characters and intelligent agents.

Prerequisites: Some previous exposure to major concepts in linear algebra (i.e. vector matrix math), curves and surfaces, dynamical systems (e.g. 2nd order mass-spring-damper systems) and 3D computer graphics has been assumed in the preparation of the course materials.

Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course is an introduction to programming. We will spend about half of the semester on Python, and then we will switch to Java. This course is a bit more practice-oriented than a typical undergraduate intro to programming.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This interdisciplinary design course focuses on the design, development, and evaluation of appropriate medical technologies for world health, particularly for diagnostic devices for Sub-Saharan Africa. Emphasis is placed on the process of developing appropriate technologies with sustainable designs for medical devices with utility in a local environment. The course integrates educational, training and service learning in a two-semester course with field-based design.

The goal of this course is to develop the thinking and research tools that will enable students to understand medical need and apply engineering design of appropriate technologies for use in diagnosing disease in local environments.

Activity: Lecture
2 Course Units

Engineers and scientists create and lead great companies, hiring managers when and where needed to help execute their vision. Designed expressly for students having a keen interest in technological innovation, this course investigates the roles of inventors and founders in successful technology ventures. Through case studies and guest speakers, we introduce the knowledge and skills needed to recognize and seize a high-tech entrepreneurial opportunity – be it a product or service – and then successfully launch a startup or spin-off company. The course studies key areas of intellectual property, its protection and strategic value; opportunity analysis and concept testing; shaping technology driven inventions into customer-driven products; constructing defensible competitive strategies; acquiring resources in the form of capital, people and strategic partners; and the founder’s leadership role in an emerging high-tech company. Throughout the course emphasis is placed on decisions faced by founders, and on the sequential risks and determinants of success in the early growth phase of a technology venture. The course is designed for, but not restricted to, students of engineering and applied science and assumes no prior business education.

Prerequisite: Third or Fourth year or Graduate standing

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

This course is the sequel to EAS 545 and focuses on the planning process for a new technology venture. Like its prerequisite, the course is designed expressly for students of engineering and applied science having a keen interest in technological innovation. Whereas EAS 545 investigates the sequential stages of engineering entrepreneurship from the initial idea through the early growth phase of a startup company, EAS 546 provides hands-on experience in developing a business plan for such a venture. Working in teams, students prepare and present a comprehensive business plan for a high-tech opportunity. The course expands on topics from EAS 545 with more in-depth attention to: industry and marketplace analysis; competitive strategies related to high-tech product/service positioning, marketing, development and operations; and preparation of sound financial plans. Effective written and verbal presentation skills are emphasized throughout the course. Ultimately, each team presents its plan to a distinguished panel of recognized entrepreneurs, investors and advisors from the high-tech industry.

Prerequisite: EAS 545

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

The goal of this course is to teach students of engineering and applied science to be effective negotiators. It aims to improve the way these students communicate i virtually any human interaction. The course intends to improve the ability of engineers and other technology disciplines to gain more support more quickly for projects, research product and services development, and marketing. For those wanting to be entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs, the course is designed essentially to find the most value possible in starting up and running companies. Based on Professor Diamond’s innovative and renowned model of negotiation, it is intended to assist those for whom technical expertise is not enough to persuade others, internally and externally, to provide resources, promotions and project approvals; or to resolve disputes, solve problems and gain more opportunities. Rejecting the 40-year-old notions of power, leverage and logic, the course focuses on persuasion by making better human connections, uncovering perceptions and emotions, and structuring agreements to be both collaborative and fair. This course is entrepreneurial in nature and can provide many times more value than traditional persuasion. The Getting More book has sold more than 1 million copies around the world and is also used by universities, corporations (Google), and U.S. Special Operations (SEALs, Green Berets, Special Forces, Marines) to save lives and reduce conflict. From the first day, students will do interactive cases based their own engineering-related problems and based on current problems in the news. There will be diagnostics enabling every student to assess his/her skill and improvements.

Applies the principles of engineering and engineering entrepreneurship to a real-world problem of your specific field of study or professional interest. Students will develop a venture based on a high-tech product or service concept. To register for the course (instructor permission required), students must submit a proposal that outlines the technology concept or venture. The course explores several key iterative processes required for successful ventures: product development, customer and market development, and business & financial modeling. Students will develop their ventures throughout the semester with the guidance of faculty and course mentors, and they will incorporate feedback from classmates and the market.

In reality, our understanding of different mechanisms and (economic) relationships is hampered by the lack of data. More often than not, either the observation itself is difficult or the data is not reliable. Over the last decades, economic experiments have become a vital part of the scientific discourse, facilitating our understanding of the world we live in (much like in Biology, Chemistry, Physics or the like). Economic experiments allow exploring economic behavior under controlled conditions by generating observations under different experimental designs and controlled conditions. Pioneering this field of research, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith were awarded the Nobel memorial prize in recognition of their work on behavioral and experimental economics. In this course, we provide you with the methodology of how to develop a research idea and a proper experimental design that allows to explore this idea. Essentially, you will learn how to think about ideas, generate predictions, and how to use economic experiments to test them.
Activity: Lecture

“Managing the Productive Core: Business Analytics” is a course on business analytics tools and their application to management problems. Its main topics are optimization, decision making under uncertainty, and simulation. The emphasis is on business analytics tools that are widely used in diverse industries and functional areas, including operations, finance, accounting, and marketing.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit

Operations strategy is about organizing people and resources to gain a competitive advantage in the delivery of products (both goods and services) to customers. This course approaches this challenge primarily from two perspectives: 1) how should a firm design their products so that they can be profitably offered; 2) how can a firm best organize and acquire resources to deliver its portfolio of products to customers. To be able to make intelligent decisions regarding these high-level choices, this course also provides a foundation of analytical methods. These methods give students a conceptual framework for understanding the linkage between how a firm manages its supply and how well that supply matches the firm’s resulting demand. Specific course topics include designing service systems, managing inventory and product variety, capacity planning, approaches to sourcing and supplier management, constructing global supply chains, managing sustainability initiatives, and revenue management. This course emphasizes both quantitative tools and qualitative frameworks. Neither is more important than the other.

Why can’t work be fun? Leading firms are engaging in the practice of gamification, using the techniques of digital game designers to serve objectives as varied as marketing, human resources management, productivity enhancement, training, innovation, and customer engagement. This course will examine the mechanism of gamification and provide an understanding of their effective use in the modern firm. Cross-listed with LGST 640. The course will draw upon interdisciplinary source material as well as real-world case studies and production game environments to identify effective analytical models, strategies, techniques, and metrics for the application of games to business. It will also identify a number of significant pitfalls to the successful implementation of gamification techniques, notably legal and ethical issues, the difficulty of making things fun, and the problems with implementing radical change in established firms. The course will include both in-person meetings and web-based online sessions.

This course examines how organizations can develop and leverage excellence in process management. The first module focuses on operations strategy. In these classes, we examine what constitutes an operation strategy and how organizations can create value by managing complexity, uncertainty, and product development. In the second half of the course, we discuss recent developments in both manufacturing and service industries. Specifically, we examine initiatives in quality, lean manufacturing and enterprise-wide planning systems. The course is recommended for those interested in consulting or operations careers, as well as students with an engineering background who wish to develop a better understanding of managing production processes.

Prerequisites: OPIM 621, OPIM 631, and OPIM 632 or equivalent

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit
Notes: Cross Listed with ESE 522

This course is about understanding emerging technology enablers with a goal of stimulating thinking on new applications for commerce. No prerequisite or technical background is assumed. The class is self-contained (mainly lecture-based) and will culminate in a class-driven identification of novel businesses that exploit these enablers. No prerequisite or technical background is assumed. Students with little prior technical background can use the course to become more technologically informed. Those with moderate to advanced technical background may find the course a useful survey of emerging technologies. The course is recommended for students interested in careers in consulting, investment banking and venture capital in the tech sector.
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit
Notes: Lectures, discussions, assignments and class participation.

Negotiation is the art and science of creating good agreements. In this course we will work on both, studying economics and psychology for the science, and practicing actual negotiations for the art. Throughout we think of negotiation in general terms, relevant not only to salary negotiations and home buying, but performance evaluations, speeches, group collaborations and interpersonal relationships. We practice these kinds of negotiations in 2-, 3-, 4-, and 6-person exercises. Potential reasons to skip this particular negotiation course: 1) We have a strong attendance policy, 2) We have strong no-computers/phones policies, 3) the course is very discussion oriented, 4) We survey your work colleagues about your influence tactics, and 5) you have a short assignment due almost every class. Beginning with the second week of class, if you miss one class you lose a letter grade. If you miss two classes you fail. We have this policy because it is an experiential class, and because your attendance directly affects classmates you are paired with. For some weeks you can attend another section if necessary.

Announcing the first iPhone at Macworld 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously boasted: “And boy, have we patented it!” How, and to what extent, do patents and intellectual property really provide competitive advantage for innovative technology companies? What makes an IP asset strategically powerful? How do patents impact, and even drive, major corporate decisions including M&A, venture funding and exits, and entry into new markets? In this course, students will learn to critically analyze and answer these questions, gaining insights they can leverage in their future roles as innovation industry executives, entrepreneurs, strategist and investors. The course includes three major units. In Unit 1, Patents and Innovation Value, we examine closely the relationship between competitive advantage, value proposition, and intellectual property (particularly patents). We will apply our understanding of that relationship to critique and sharpen patent strategy to protect examples of cutting-edge technologies. In Unit 2, Patent Leverage and the Corporate Playbook, we study theory and examples of how intellectual property leverage strategically informs corporate transactions and decisions, for established companies as well as for start-ups. In unit 3, Limits and Alternatives to Patents, we confront the recent legal trend toward reigning in the power and scope of patents. We also consider the growing importance of data as a proprietary technology asset, and discuss options for adapting intellectual property strategy appropriately. Throughout, students will learn and practice applying the concepts we learn to decision-making in examples based on innovative real-world technologies and businesses.

0.5 Credit units

The course is designed to meet the needs of future managers, entrepreneurs, consultants and investors who must analyze and develop business strategies in technology-based industries. The emphasis is on learning conceptual models and frameworks to help navigate the complexity and dynamism in such industries. This is not a course in new product development or in using information technology to improve business processes and offerings. We will take a perspective of both established and emerging firms competing through technological innovations, and study the key strategic drivers of value creation and appropriation in the context of business ecosystems. The course uses a combination of cases, simulation and readings. The cases are drawn primarily from technology-based industries. Note, however, that the case discussions are mainly based on strategic (not technical) issues. Hence, a technical background is not required for fruitful participation.

This course develops your knowledge and skills for designing, leading, and consulting with teams in organizations. The goals are to provide both the conceptual understanding and the behavioral skills required to improve effectiveness. This course emphasizes class participation, readings, analytic and reflective writing, assessments, peer feedback and coaching, lectures simulations and an intensive field project. with a real team in the Philadelphia area. Four kinds of teams are the focus of study: teams of which you’ve been a member in the past; your 740 team, with three or four classmates; a team outside of 740 that your 740 Team will observe, analyze, and report on –your Host Team; and a team that you expect to be on in the future. The case material for learning and applying course concepts will be these teams that you know from direct observation and experience. Expect to leave this course with new knowledge of how to diagnose and intervene – as leader, member, or consultant – to improve the performance, sustainability, an4 impact on the members of any team in any setting. The text is by J. Richard Hackman, Leading Teams (Harvard Business).

Prerequisites: MGMT 610

Designed for students with a serious interest in entrepreneurship, this course will provide you with an advanced theoretical foundation and a set of practical tools for the management of startups and entrepreneurial teams in fast-changing and innovative environments. Building on the skills of Management 801, every class session is built around an experience where you have to put learning into practice, including the award-winning Looking Glass entrepreneurial simulation, role-playing exercises, and a variety of other games and simulations. The goal is to constantly challenge you to deal with entrepreneurial or innovative experiences, as you learn to navigate complex and changing environments on the fly, applying what you learned to a variety of scenarios. Management 802 is built to be challenging and will require a desire to deal with ambiguous and shifting circumstances. Format: Lectures, discussion, interim reports, class participation, readings report, and presentations, and an innovation assessment in PowerPoint format.

MGMT 801 strongly recommended.

This elective half-semester course focuses on venture capital management issues in the context of the typical high-growth potential early stage start-up company. The course is fundamentally pragmatic in its outlook. It will cover seven principal areas relevant to the privately held high-growth start-up which include: commentary on the venture capital industry generally, as well as a discussion of the typical venture fund structure and related venture capital objectives and investment strategies; common organizational issues encountered in the formation of a venture backed start-up, including issues relating to initial capitalization, intellectual property and early stage equity arrangements; valuation methodologies that form the basis of the negotiation between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist in anticipation of a venture investment; the challenges of fundraising, financing strategies and the importance of the business plan and the typical dynamics that play out between VC and entrepreneur. typical investment terms found in the term sheet and the dynamics of negotiation between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist; compensation practices in a venture capital backed company; and corporate governance in the context of a privately-held, venture capital-backed start-up company and the typical dynamics that play out between VC and entrepreneur in an insider-led, “down round” financing.
Requirements: Classroom participation, weekly case assignments, and final exam Format: Lecture, case studies, class participation, weekly case assignments, and final exam.

MGMT 801 recommended

Activity: Lecture
0.5 Course Unit

This advanced course on entrepreneurship focuses on developing a validated opportunity or concept into a venture that is ready for seed financing and/or launching the product or service. Participants in this course must previously have developed a validated opportunity, either in a previous course or through independent efforts. Students may participate as a team of up to three people. Ideally, participants are committed to pursuing their opportunity commercially, or at least to seriously explore that possibility. The course provides a practical guidance for developing the product or service, forming the entity, raising capital building the team, establishing partnerships, and sourcing professional services. After completing the course, you will be “pitch ready” – whether submitting to campus venture competitions or to outside investors. Most coursework is focused on applying concepts and frameworks to project tasks in developing the venture. Students must have successfully completed MGMT 801 before enrolling in this course.
Format: Highly interactive
Requirements: Class participation, interim assignments.

This is a course on creating a business to attack a social problem and thereby accomplish both social impact and financial sustainability. For this course, social entrepreneurship is defined as entrepreneurship used to profitably confront social problems. This definition therefore views social entrepreneurship as a distinct alternative to public sector initiatives. The basic thesis is that many social problems, if looked at through an entrepreneurial lens, create opportunity for someone to launch a venture that generates profits by alleviating that social problem. This sets in motion a virtuous cycle – the entrepreneur is incented to generate more profits and in so doing, the more the profits made, the more the problem is alleviated. Even if it is not possible to eventually create a profit-making enterprise, the process of striving to do so can lead to a resource-lean not-for-profit entity. Creating a profitable social entrepreneurship venture is by no means a simple challenge.

Successful medical devices are an amalgamation of creative and innovative thinking, clinical expertise, and engineering know-how that endures intense regulatory and reimbursement scrutiny. This course will provide a foundation for understanding the nuances of the medical device industry. It will cover topics ranging from device design and discovery, regulatory issues, marketing, reimbursement, management, and strategy. Classroom activities will be supplemented with optional tours of hospitals, research and manufacturing facilities, and hands-on demonstrations of devices. Though the course is intended primarily for MBA students, it will be open to medical and engineering students as well as to hospital house staff.

The course focuses on the creation, funding, and management of biotechnology and health services enterprises. The course is designed to supplement other offerings in the Health Care Systems and Management Departments for those students with entrepreneurial interest in such ventures, and will focus on special issues surrounding the conceptualization, planning, diligence and capitalization, launch, compensation and management of these ventures. In addition, course offers methods for self-assessment & development of business models and plans, techniques for technology assessment and strategy, develops foundation for capitalization and partnering strategies, and creates a basis for best practices in company launch and plan execution. Students must apply to take this course. Please see the Health Care Management Department for the application.

This course addresses how to design and implement the best combination of marketing efforts to carry out a firm’s strategy in its target markets. Specifically, this course seeks to develop the student’s (1) understanding of how the firm can benefit by creating and delivering value to its customers, and stakeholders, and (2) skills in applying the analytical concepts and tools of marketing to such decisions as segmentation and targeting, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion. The course uses lectures and case discussions, case write-ups, student presentations, and a comprehensive final examination to achieve these objectives.

Building upon Marketing 611, the goal of this course is to develop skills in formulating and implementing marketing strategies for brands and businesses. The course will focus on issues such as the selection of which businesses and segments to compete in, how to allocate resources across businesses, segments, and elements of the marketing mix, as well as other significant strategic issues facing today’s managers in a dynamic competitive environment. A central theme of the course is that the answer to these strategic problems varies over time depending on the stage of the product life cycle at which marketing decisions are being made. As such, the PLC serves as the central organizing vehicle of the course. We will explore such issues as how to design optimal strategies for the launch of new products and services that arise during the introductory phase, how to maximize the acceleration of revenue during the growth phase, how to sustain and extend profitability during the mature phase, and how to manage a business during the inevitable decline phase.

Prerequisite: MKTG 611

Marketing begins and ends with the customer, from determining customers’ needs and wants to providing customer satisfaction and maintaining customer relationships. This course examines the basic concepts and principles in customer behavior with the goal of understanding how these ideas can be used in marketing decision making. The class will consist of a mix of lectures, discussions, cases, assignments, project work and exams. Topics covered include customer psychological processes (e.g., motivation, perception, attitudes, decision-making) and their impact on marketing (e.g., segmentation, branding, and customer satisfaction). The goal is to provide you with a set of approaches and concepts to consider when faced with a decision involving understanding customer responses to marketing actions.

Firms have access to detailed data of customers and past marketing actions. Such data may include in-store and online customer transactions, customer surveys as well as prices and advertising. Using real-world applications from various industries, the goal of the course is to familiarize students with several types of managerial problems as well as data sources and techniques, commonly employed in making effective marketing decisions. The course would involve formulating critical managerial problems, developing relevant hypotheses, analyzing data and, most importantly, drawing inferences and telling convincing narratives, with a view of yielding actionable results.

This course provides a total immersion in the new product development process – from sourcing ideas and innovation, through new product sales forecasting. The focus is on collective learning, what works, what doesn’t, and why. While the primary focus is the new product development process within a corporate structure, some coverage is given to key issues surrounding start-ups.

The effect of the Internet and related technologies on business and social institutions is more profound than that of any prior invention, including the printing press and the internal combustion engine. Furthermore, marketing plays a key role in shaping the modern consumption-led economies fueled by these technologies. MKTG 727 provides a research-based and framework-driven approach to understanding digital marketing and electronic commerce. The course is organized into two sections and utilizes relevant theory, empirical analysis, and practical examples, to develop the key learning points. Guest speakers will participate as well, as appropriate.

Brain science offers the potential to unlock the future of business, by providing new insights that can enhance decision-making, improve precision in design and marketing, build team chemistry and cultivate leadership, fine-tune selection and human performance, drive creativity and innovation, create social value, and optimize digital interaction. New developments in biometrics, implantable and wearable devices, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, nutrition, and the human microbiome, offer the opportunity for enhanced precision and impact in marketing, finance, management, analytics, and education. This course will provide an overview of contemporary brain science and its applications to business. Students first will be introduced to the basic anatomy and physiology of the brain and become familiar with important techniques for measuring and manipulating brain function. The course will then survey major findings in neuroscience with applications to business, including selective attention and advertising; valuation and marketing; decision making; learning, innovation and creativity; and social influence, team-building, and leadership. The course will end with a discussion of ethics, brain-machine interactions, and artificial intelligence. Applications to business, education, sports, law, and policy will be discussed throughout.

0.5 Course Unit

This course focuses on the real life marketing challenges involved in launching an entrepreneurial venture. The primary goal of the course will to provide a roadmap for students seeking to actively engage as entrepreneurs, investors or managers in the startup culture. Many of the entrepreneurial marketing principles studied in this course will be equally applicable to mid-size and larger companies seeking new approaches to drive top-line growth. The course will address how start-ups, early growth stage and more mature companies have used entrepreneurial marketing as an essential competitive weapon to grow their businesses by gaining customers, driving revenue, acquiring funding and recruiting A-level employees, advisors and directors. Students will form teams and select an idea/concept for an entrepreneurial venture, and by the conclusion of the course will have developed a fully fleshed out and testable marketing plan. Preferably, the selected venture will be one that one or more members of the team would consider implementing, should their plan prove feasible.

Prerequisites: Completion of MKTG 611; and MKTG 612 or MKTG 613; and MKTG 712; (May take MKTG 612 or 613, and MKTG 712 concurrently); Students are discouraged from taking this course and MKTG 721 except with permission of an MBA adviser.

Activity: Lecture
0.5 Course Unit

Why do some products catch on and achieve huge popularity while others fail? Why do some behaviors spread like wildfire while others languish? How do certain ideas seem to stick in memory while others disappear the minute you hear them? More broadly, what factors lead to trends, social contagion, and social epidemics? Interactive media, word of mouth, and viral marketing are important issues for companies, brands, and organizations. This course looks at these and other topics as it examines how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on and become popular. Marketers want their product to be popular, organizations want their social change initiative to catch on and entrepreneurs want their ideas to stick. This course will touch on four main aspects: (1) Characteristics of products, ideas, and behaviors that lead them to be successful. (2) Aspects of individual psychology that influence what things are successful. (3) Interpersonal processes, or how interactions between individuals drive success. (4) Social networks, or how patterns of social ties influence success.
Taught by: Berger

Prerequisites: MKTG 711 and MKTG 712 are recommended but not required.

One-term course offered either term
Activity: Lecture
1 Course Unit
Notes: Lecture, class discussion, cases. (Former MKTG 728)

MKTG 770 explores the digital marketing environment from both a consumer and business perspective. The course provides an overview of various online business models and delves into digital advertising and social media marketing techniques and technologies. A mixture of case studies, guest speakers and assignments, including one that uses real advertising data, translates theory into practice. It is recommended that students enrolling in the course be comfortable using Excel and are knowledgeable in applying regression analysis techniques. Students who would prefer a less technical course may wish to take MKTG 727, Digital Marketing and Electronic Commerce, a half cu course offered by the department.

This course will expose students to the theoretical and empirical “building blocks” that will allow them to develop and implement powerful models of customer behavior. Over the years, researchers and practitioners have used these methods for a wide variety of applications, such as new product sales forecasting, analyses of media usage, customer valuation, and targeted marketing programs. These same techniques are also very useful for other types of business (and non-business) problems. The course will be entirely lecture-based with a strong emphasis on real-time problem solving. Most sessions will feature sophisticated numerical investigations using Microsoft Excel. Much of the material is highly technical.
Taught by: Fader

Prerequisites: Students must have a high comfort level with basic integral calculus, and recent exposure to a formal course in probability and statistics is strongly recommended.

Course usually offered in spring term
Activity: Lecture, real-time problem solving
1 Course Unit

In the past decade, massive shifts in how companies interact with their customers have suddenly made field experiments an economically feasible way to learn about a variety of business questions such as what types of promotions are most effective, what products should be stocked at a store, how e-mail promotions should be designed, how sales staff should be compensated, etc. Many marketers engaged in online retailing, direct-marketing, online advertising, media management, etc. are rapidly embracing a “test and learn” philosophy and a number of platforms such as Google Website Optimizer, have been developed to facilitate rigorous field experiments in the online environment. Just as with the quality revolution in manufacturing during the 1980s and 1990s, the rapid rise of the “test and learn” philosophy in marketing has created a huge demand for those who can design, field, and analyze marketing experiments. Through this course, you will learn and practice a wide range of critical skills, from the statistical methods used to design and analyze experiments to the management and strategy required to execute an experiment and act on the results. Although the cases and examples will focus on marketing problems, the material covered can be applied in a number of other domains particularly operations management and product design.

How can studying the brain improve our understanding of consumer behavior? While neuroscience made tremendous strides throughout the 20th century, rarely were meaningful applications developed outside of medicine. Recently, however, breakthroughs in measurement and computation have accelerated brain science and created a dizzying array of opportunities in business and technology. Currently, applications to marketing research and product development are experiencing explosive growth that has been met with both excitement and skepticism. This mini-course provides an overview of the neuroscience behind and the potential for these developments. Topics will range from well-known and widely used applications, such as eye-tracking measures in the lab and field, to emerging methods and measures, such as mobile technologies, face-reading algorithms, and neural predictors of marketing response. The course will also discuss applications in branding and product development, including wearable physiological devices and apps, sensory branding for foods and fragrances, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and neuroscience-based products designed to enhance cognitive functions. These applications stem from many subfields of cognitive neuroscience, including attention, emotion, memory, and decision making. This course is self-contained and has no prerequisites. However, students with some background in business, economics, psychology, and/or neuroscience are likely to find the material covered in this course complementary to their existing knowledge.

Understand the role of sustainability in business today, as it relates to corporate strategy, business operations, financial objectives, and social responsibility. Learn how corporations that have made sustainability a core tenant of their strategy are making a significant impact on the environment, independent of government regulation, while driving strong financial results. Gain an appreciation for the trade-offs that are being made daily in business around sustainability issues and understand that there isn’t always a “right answer.” Be exposed to the exciting opportunities that sustainability challenges present for business, entrepreneurs, and people engaged in this sector. Focus on real world topics through case study and current news, enabling exposure to how the issues of business and sustainability are creating opportunity, while still being debated, managed, and evolved very rapidly.
Activity: Lecture