Event Details

Integrated Product Development (IPD) is an experiential, cross-disciplinary course that puts teams of students from Business, Engineering and Art/Architecture in a competitive product development environment.

In this course, each team acts as an independent firm in competition with other teams (firms). The instructors announce a product class and each team must design and build a fully functional product within that class. The product class is broad enough to allow a wide variety of design solutions.

Given the product class, each team must work through the process of market research, concept generation and selection, technical development, production process design, pricing, inventory stocking and advertising. Teams must design, build and compete with a real, fully functional, customer-ready product. Teams compete with their products through two channels. The first is a web-based “trade show” where teams promote their products via student-designed web sites, and people from around the world log into the IPD trade show to vote.