About 310

A Radical Course (since 1969)

You are invited to participate in Engineering 310abc: Engineering Design Entrepreneurship. In this award-winning, thirty-week, graduate-level-depth sequence, you�ll work with Stanford faculty, students, staff and their extraordinary network of innovation. Offered by the Mechanical Engineering Design Group, this course is open to Stanford students from all disciplines. Its global network of faculty and students come from some of the most distinguished design programs around the world.

In this course, Stanford Masters and PhD degree candidates (typically possessing one to six years of practical engineering experience) are introduced to the tools, methods and thinking strategies needed to form and creatively manage distributed design engineering teams. The course is well known for taking ideas from concept to fully functional proof-of-concept prototypes suitable for engineering and customer evaluation. Our graduates are also highly skilled at navigating the entire innovation process, from conceptual brainstorming to comprehensive documentation and manufacturing.

Driven by student demand and corporate practice, we have engaged a network of global academic partners to bring exceptional diversity to our various teams. Diversity has been demonstrated to correlate highly with design team innovation, and it is one of the core variables that Stanford�s Center for Design Research finds valuable. As a corporate partner, you will be working with paired teams of three students on Stanford�s campus and three to four students at one of Stanford�s select foreign university programs. For the 2007�2008 academic year we have engaged the following institutions: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland; University of St. Gallen, Switzerland; Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany; Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia; and Universidad Nacional Aut�noma de M�xico, Mexico City, Mexico.

Multi-disciplinary teams examine industry-proposed design challenges from many perspectives, including cultural factors, business design, market potential, and technical feasibility, all in order to determine specific product and performance requirements. These teams reduce functional solutions to practice within nine months using 2 person-years, assuming 35% effort levels for 6 global team members. Faculty consulting contributions are a significant side benefit.

A Teaching Team

Professors Mark Cutkosky (ME) and Larry Leifer (BioEngr) co-instruct the course. They are aided by Consulting Professors Victor Scheinman (ME, ASME Leonardo da Vinci award winner) Bob Plummer (CS) as chief technical officer and software architect, respectively. Five post-Masters graduate students serve as teaching assistants. Each team is assigned an engineering-culture coach � volunteers who typically have taken 310 and have between five and thirty years of professional experience with deep networks in the Bay Area and the global technical community. Technologically, the course is supported by Consulting Professor George Toye (ME & IT), and administratively by Ms. Michelle Lucas. In short, you will be working with an extraordinary team.

Outcomes You Can Expect

Projects for 310 are suggested by industry partners and refined through consultation with the teaching team. Successful projects tend to be new-product-related innovation challenges driven by real-world issues that are of vital interest to the company in question. Most projects include human-machine interaction, service engineering, and manufacturing issues � all subjects that demand attention to ergonomics, software design, and socio-technical factors. At the same time, they pay close heed to the mechatronic systems fundamentals that are the Stanford Design Group�s core competency.

Students drive the project forward while learning through a sequence of experiments based on increasingly refined prototypes. Actions and thought are continuously documented and summarized at the end of each quarter with a comprehensive document. The first report (issued in December) defines client-customer needs and design requirements. The second (March) report details performance requirements and test-validation protocols. The third (June) report documents concept realization, outcome characterization, and user testing. To quote Donald Knuth (CS), the goal is to �capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design.�

Winning Project Features

In order to be successful, a winning project will usually do the following:

Challenge students' creative and intellectual abilities.
Be conceptually and technically challenging while retaining modest cost and physical size.
Be of deep concern to the company, but not on a critical production path.
Give the relevant student learning team considerable freedom of action and decision-making authority.
Benefit from an open-door policy between student team, company liaison, and company knowledge and insight.

All of these factors are important individually, but when assembled together, they provide a remarkable path for success and fulfilling, beneficial achievement.

Liaison Guidelines

The academic and corporate success of a project in Engineering 310 depends greatly on the existence of an effective company liaison. It is vitally important that the liaison be willing and able to meet with the design team regularly, serve as the point-of-contact for corporate expertise and has project background information to be able to assist in developing design requirements and associated test and validation protocols.

Liaisons should plan on at least one face-to-face meeting in November and at least two other meetings on campus or at company sites over the course of the project. We recommend weekly communication via email, telephone, fax and/or videoconference. Internet video conferencing is available in Terman room 583 (the 310-loft) and Terman room 501 (tele-studio).

Company Financial Commitment

The Stanford Affiliate project fee for the 2007-2008 term remains set at $75,000 for one 30-week project team at Stanford, plus the fees required by the Academic Partners (these range from $25,000 to $65,000 depending on local circumstances). Fees cover costs, and include university infrastructure charges, teaching team time, laboratory services, travel, telecommunication services, and prototype fabrication. The exact terms and routing of payments are negotiated on a flexible case-by-case basis.

Project Proposal Timing

In order to ensure a project slot in the course, it�s requested that you confirm participation in Engineering 310 and indicate an academic partner institutional preference for the academic year 2007-2008 as soon as possible. Teams are reserved on a first-come, first-served basis after we have received a letter of intent. We will then invoice you for a deposit of $25,000, due within 45 days. The receipt of the funds confirms a project in Engineering 310 and the availability of the preferred partner institution. After confirmation of the project, please submit a 1-4 page project abstract as soon as possible and no later than the end of September.

If you would like to begin the project development process, please contact the 310 Executive Director, Philipp Skogstad at skogstad@stanford.edu or +1 (650) 799-0298.

Additional information

# 310 Agreement

Links to Stanford University Policy Documents
1. Collaboration Agreement Template
2. Research Policy Handbook, Chapter 5