Work in progress — Product evolution from an engineering perspective

In entrepreneurship and innovation circles, “painstorming” is a process by which a person examines either a particular product or the world around them with the goal of identifying negative customer/user issues to serve as focal points for development efforts or research. In business education, the concept of product evolution is used to both chart the stages in the product development and to examine changes in a product over time from a product characteristics and market-needs perspective. To promote the transfer of classroom knowledge into practice through the context of entrepreneurship, a classroom tool termed a “product evolution study” has been developed to help students identify and describe the growth and transformation of a product within the context of the energy relations, material properties and engineering involved in the products as they relate to class learning objectives. This tool is intended for insertion within a content-oriented engineering class, such as Fluid Mechanics, to provide context for the subject matter and to model the everyday application of entrepreneurial thinking. Student experiences with this type of analysis are being used to develop a formal, graphical procedure for describing the evolution of a product from the standpoint of the underlying physics involved in the product's development.