Provides students with an overview of design for entertainment and play, as well as opportunities in creative product design and community service. Students develop ideas for new toys that serve clients in the community, and work in teams with local sponsors and with experienced mentors on a themed toy design project. Students enhance creativity and experience fundamental aspects of the product development process, including determining customer needs, brainstorming, estimation, sketching, sketch modeling, concept development, design aesthetics, detailed design, and prototyping. Includes written, visual, and oral communication. Enrollment limited; preference to freshmen.

D. Wallace

Professor

Toy Product Design

Introduction to the substance and process of funding technology startups. Topics include a comparative analysis of various sources of capital; templates to identify the optimal investor; legal frameworks, US and offshore, of the investment process and its related jargon; an introduction to understanding venture capital as a business; and market practice and standards for term sheet negotiation. Emphasizes strategy as well as tactics necessary to negotiate and build effective, long-term relationships with investors, particularly venture capital firms (VCs).

S. Loessberg

Senior Lecturer

Money for Startups

Introduces skills and capabilities for real-world problem solving to take technology from lab to societal impact: technical and functional exploration, opportunity discovery, market understanding, value economics, scale-up, intellectual property, and communicating/working for impact across disciplines. Students work in multidisciplinary teams formed around MIT research breakthroughs, with extensive in-class coaching and guidance from faculty, lab members, and select mentors. Follows a structured approach to innovating in which everything is a variable and the product, technology, and opportunities for new ventures can be seen as an act of synthesis. Teams gather evidence that permits a fact-based iteration across multiple application domains, markets, functionalities, technologies, and products, leading to a recommendation that maps a space of opportunity and includes actionable next steps to evolve the market and technology.

L. Perez-Breva

Lecturer

Innovation Teams

Provides an integrated approach to the development and growth of new innovative ventures. Intended for students who seek to leverage their engineering and science background through innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Emphasizes the concept that innovation-driven entrepreneurs must make a set of interdependent choices under conditions of high uncertainty, and demonstrates that venture engineering involves reducing uncertainty through a structured process of experimental learning and staged commitments. Provides deep understanding of the core technical, customer, and strategic choices and challenges facing start-up innovators, and a synthetic framework for the development and implementation of ventures in dynamic environments.

How to Make (Almost) Anything

4.140

About the Class

Faculty