Market strategy skills are essential for engineers. A lesson plan that teaches introductory market strategy skills to engineering students is developed. The lesson plan is designed for junior level undergraduate students to meet some of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) 2005-2006 Criteria 3 (program outcomes and assessment). The challenge is to convey market strategies using a learner-centered approach into an engineering course. The first lesson is to demonstrate the difference between concurrent engineering and “over-the-wall” engineering. After this exercise, a discussion on key terms in product development and marketing is conducted. The key terms that are defined are core competence, continuous innovation, discontinuous innovation, dominant design, acceptability, adaptability, market entry, barriers, first to market, and late to market. Case studies are used to teach students basic marketing terms helping them to understand how to design products to solve for a need within constraints (ABET Criteria 3C), techniques to identify and solve problems (ABET Criteria 3E), and how engineering impacts society (ABET Criteria 3H). The fully developed lesson plans, best practices, and student responses are presented.

Volume Subject Area:
Mechanical Engineering Education
Topics:
Accreditation, Concurrent engineering, Design, Engineering education, Engineering students, Engineers, Innovation, Performance, Product development, Students, Undergraduate students
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