BEng in Process and Innovation
Technical University of Denmark · 2020 – 2024
- Institution
- Technical University of Denmark
- Degree
- BEng in Process and Innovation
- Period
- 2020 – 2024
- ECTS
- 210
Process and Innovation is the applied, workshop-facing half of my education, and the premise of it is that an engineer should be able to take something from an idea through to the point where an organisation can actually run it. This is due to it being a diplomingeniør degree, which means it carries a mandatory six-month placement in industry and a diploma project written with a company rather than with a supervisor alone.
Furthermore the breadth is the point rather than a compromise, since the same three and a half years covered materials science and physics alongside managerial economics, interaction design and five courses with programming in them. This means I came out able to talk to a machinist, a developer and a finance person about the same product, which is the part I have used most and the part that is hardest to show on a transcript.
The diploma project
Twenty ECTS went on designing an innovation framework to propel radical innovation within GEA, written at the Department of Engineering Technology and Didactics. The question was not how to generate more ideas but why radical ones stalled on the way through an organisation built for incremental work.
Internship
The degree carries a mandatory placement, and mine was thirty ECTS at LEGO System A/S, which is documented under Experience rather than here.
- Internship - LEGO System A/S30 ECTS
- Six months of concept development and prototype testing inside a product organisation.
Product development and design
This is the spine of the degree, and the sequence runs from a first sketch to a tested prototype, with a different constraint added at each stage.
- From idea to checkout15 ECTS
- Taking a product idea through development and production planning to an actual sale.
- Product development - the stages and processes of product development5 ECTS
- The phase model of product development, and what each gate is actually for.
- Industrial design5 ECTS
- Sketching, clay mock-ups and CAD as one continuous process from need to physical model.
- Interaction design5 ECTS
- Affordances, signifiers, and usability testing with people who are not the designer.
- Design, users and ethics5 ECTS
- Designing for people whose needs differ from your own, and the ethics of doing that.
- Project 2 prototype development5 ECTS
- Building a prototype in order to answer a question rather than to demonstrate an answer.
- Project 15 ECTS
- A first engineering project run as a team, with a report and a defence.
Engineering fundamentals
The analytical base of the degree, and the part I use least directly and rely on most, since it is what makes the rest of it engineering rather than design.
- Materials science5 ECTS
- Material properties, selection and failure modes.
- Physics 15 ECTS
- Mechanics, energy and the physical reasoning underneath a design decision.
- Calculus and algebra 15 ECTS
- Single-variable calculus and the algebra the later courses assume.
- Calculus and algebra 25 ECTS
- Multivariable calculus and linear algebra.
- Advanced engineering mathematics 25 ECTS
- Differential equations and linear algebra applied to engineering problems.
- Statistical analysis and data visualisation5 ECTS
- Describing a dataset honestly, and choosing a chart that does not oversell it.
Programming and physical computing
Five courses with code in them, and what they have in common is that the output was usually a board or a device rather than a submission.
- Introduction to programming and data processing5 ECTS
- Python fundamentals and data handling, and the habit of writing a small tool rather than doing it by hand.
- Programming5 ECTS
- Structured programming, data structures, and debugging as a discipline rather than as guesswork.
- Programming intelligent vehicles and mobile applications5 ECTS
- Reading live data off a vehicle bus and building an application around it.
- Physical computing5 ECTS
- Microcontrollers, sensors and state machines, and getting two boards to agree on something.
- Introduction to machine learning and data mining5 ECTS
- An introduction to the standard supervised and unsupervised methods and the data they require.
Innovation, organisation and business
The half of the degree that is about what happens to a product once other people are involved, and the recurring lesson is that the organisation is usually the harder constraint.
- Innovation pilot10 ECTS
- Running a real client problem end to end with a team, and reporting on it.
- Semester project 4 Innovation in an organisational context10 ECTS
- Placing an innovation initiative inside an existing organisation rather than beside it.
- Creativity and innovation5 ECTS
- Structured ideation run as a method rather than as inspiration.
- Managing innovation and knowledge management5 ECTS
- How knowledge moves, or fails to move, between parts of a company.
- Management and organisation5 ECTS
- How structure, incentives and culture decide which ideas survive.
- Project management - tools and practical management5 ECTS
- Milestone plans, time and budget estimation, stakeholder analysis and risk analysis.
- Technology, marketing and innovation5 ECTS
- Positioning a technical product for a market that does not care how it works.
- Managerial economics5 ECTS
- Cost structures, break-even, and the numbers behind an investment decision.
- Green entrepreneurship5 ECTS
- Material choice and life cycle thinking as the basis of a venture rather than as an afterthought.
- Social Entrepreneurship: Theory and practice5 ECTS
- Ventures measured on social outcome as well as on return.